Okay...

[bumblepudding]

I know that this is supposed to be sweet, but am I the only one who finds the following ritual a little creepy?

Across the country, growing numbers of conservative Christian evangelicals are staging just such gala affairs. They are called purity balls, and they celebrate the father-daughter bond. Tuxedo-clad dads promise to "war for" their

Comments

[cai]

I have a publication coming out next year about just such things. It's in a book called "Selling Jesus" or somesuch (I don't think the title is figured out yet) and the gist of my article is that Sex Sells even in Christianity. A big section on purity balls and chastity fests and so forth. Pretty creepy, vaguely incestuous stuff, yes. I especially like the advice often giving of "If you feel like having sex with your boyfriend/girlfriend, imagine the faces of your parents and that will help you not have sex." Or else it will help you think kinky things about your folks? :)

[bumblepudding]

...

Yeah.

The concept of thinking of your father when you want to have sex takes on a whole new meaning when you're "married" to him. There's definitely something perverse about all of this.

[cyranocyrano]

Yeah, it's really damned creepy.
However, it grows out of a religion that practices ritualized cannibalism and has a strong fixation on torture and suffering.

[destrukto]

No, you're not the only one.

[jyoti]

I wonder if even conservative Christian evangelicals find the concept of mother-son purity balls too creepy to consider? Where are the moms in all of this?

Trying to remember the statistics for the girls who take these vows... I think it's something like eighty percent have premarital sex anyway.

[callunav]

It's not the moms, it's that virginity in boys and men is at best a middling, vague, ambivalent virtue. A little lip service in some quarters...I'm sorry, maybe 'lip service' wasn't a good turn of phrase...but mostly not anything people want to talk about very much.

Virginity in girls, however, is hot stuff, obviously.

[bumblepudding]

You're right, I think, that conservatives are far more comfortable with a whiff of romance between father and daughter ("Daddy's girl") than between mother and son ("Momma's boy" usually being a slur.) I suppose it has to do with traditional codes of masculinity and femininity. Simply put, mothers must be very careful in asserting themselves over their male children; not so fathers over their daughters.

[manicmuse]

This is so creepy. I don't even know where to begin.

"And few would dispute that the sexual objectification of women plays a major role in distorting both adolescent girls' self-perceptions and their sexual behaviors."

These Purity Balls are just another form of objectification. They're not teaching the girls to be responsible or accountable for their actions, or independent thinkers. Buying a girl a dress, a corsage, and taking her for a dance around the ballroom does not replace open and honest dicussion and trust. They're rewarding the daughter giving up her free will by giving her body and her decision-making skills over to someone else.

It's assumed "You're going to be bad so we have to stop it now. You can't handle your own body, you can't be trusted, so you need someone else to think for you." They may as well be handing out panties with padlocks for party favors.

[bumblepudding]

Good point. One wonders what opinion these fathers hold of their daughters' capabilities when the fathers' answer to the supposed threat of premarital sex is to "marry" their girls before any of the naughty boys can get to them.

And how does one 'war for' his daughter's purity? Who is the enemy? Young males? Are shotguns involved somehow?

Shotguns are always involved. As are colons with secondary titles.

[drastic]

"Godhammer: War for Purity" would make a great videogame.