Pure Poppycock

Last March, the Today show featured a segment on the phenomenon--I'm pretty sure we can just go ahead and call this a phenomenon--of something called Purity Balls, in which fathers take their daughters on a date. No, really. In the course of the festivities and a ceremony involving—I swear I am not making this up—roses, swords and a large white cross, the girls promise to remain “pure”, that is, to not have sex until they get married, and even signing “pledges” to that effect. This thing must really be taking off, because there it is again in the July 28th issue of Time magazine, an article titled "The Pursuit of Purity" by Nancy Gibbs.

I don’t know what these people—I'd assumed them to be Bible Belt conservatives but possibly not—are thinking. Maybe they aren’t thinking. Surely if the mothers and fathers who endorse the concept of purity pledges considered more carefully the full ramifications they’d not let their children—daughters only, is it?—anywhere near it. I mean, it’s disturbing on the face of it.

And creepy. Are these parents so freaked by modern culture, and so uncomfortable with adolescent—especially female—sexuality that the best, the only, way they know how to respond is by psychologically handcuffing their girls to unfair and ultimately unrealistic promises of chastity? (And am I right to be skeptical that the sexuality of sons is not considered nearly so problematic? The Nancy Gibb piece hints at more pledges to come, this time involving boys.)

When I read about teenage sexual behaviors the statistical data suggests that assertions that kids are having sex at younger ages is simply not true, yet the promos for the “Today” show piece inferred the opposite. So what’s going on? Are worried parents misreading or reading too much into their youngster's fascination with the flagrant trampiness of Paris and her acolytes? But even if the concern is entirely justified, the notion that parents can protect their daughters by extracting promises of sexual purity from them seems to me somehow deluded, wrongheaded.

The girls will sign of course, the majority of them no doubt happily, eagerly. Kids love their parents after all, trust that their moms and dads know best and have their best interests at heart, and they want to please them and make them proud. But how long will it be before these daughters are sorry, even resentful, that they went along with such an agreement? What, in real-life terms, will it mean to a young girl to promise to wait until marriage for the experience of physical intimacy?

The dads interviewed for the Time article, including co-inventor of the purity pledge balls, Randy Wilson, insisted that the pledges are not just about sex, and that focusing solely on that aspect misses the point. They spoke of the need to commit more fully as fathers to their children, to protect their girls and be better role models for their families and communities. Well, yes--who could argue with that? I read those words and thought how commendable, how absolutely admirable, how right.

Then I kept reading, noting that one of the daughters attending the purity ball with her daddy was only 4 years old; also in attendance was a 10 year old who shyly admitted she had no idea what the purity pledge meant beyond promising her dad "to be a virgin until you are married and not have a lot of boyfriends." And according to that Today show segment, 11 year olds are being asked to sign these pledges.

That figures. I remember—more vividly than I would have expected from this distance—being an 11 year old. Though I developed crushes left and right, at least one of them quite erotic, the mechanics of sex, the actual doing of the deed, was a remote and vaguely icky mystery I was in no particular hurry to solve. Few girls so young would object to agreeing to a purity restriction, especially when it's her favorite boyfriend—every little girls first crush—asking it of her and doing so at an emotional, elaborate, Cinderella-type party at that. (Had my dad cared enough to stick around and escort me to such a lavish event I would have swooned, agreeing to absolutely anything he requested, up to and including always calling my stepmother “Mom”.)

A few pertinent questions, though: What happens when a naive, starry-eyed 11 year old playing dress-up turns 15, turns 16, 18, 20—will she still want to keep such a promise? Will she feel able to? Will she feel she should even have to?

Will these pledges really make the young girls who sign on to them stronger, more confident and wiser in their choices—or will they remain perennial adolescents incapable of making choices of their own? Is it understood that as of a certain magic age—which would be what, by the way, and decided by whom?—these daughters are released from the pledges they signed, expected finally to decide their personal lives for themselves? How do they do that, though, when up to that point their most intimate decisions were in the hands of someone else, someone who with the passage of time may no longer seem so heroic and infallible?

And what sort of women will these pledges create?

What happens to the “bad daughters” who rebel and decide to have sex? They promised after all; on an evening unlike any other they pledged to their devoted daddies (or daddy substitutes) "not to" until marriage. What if they can’t keep that promise? Will they sneak around, riven with guilt and shame? And will they delude themselves that if they don’t take any birth control or other precautions they’ve got wiggle room to characterize their sexual encounters as “accidental” and their purity thus “technically” intact? What about the resultant risk of STDs, HIV, AIDS? And how many unplanned pregnancies will be the result of such a strategy, and who raises those daughters?

And what are the options for the “good girls”? Will they ease their consciences by feeling compelled to marry the first guy they fuck, regardless of whether or not either partner truly wants to marry? What if they’re both too young? What if daddy doesn’t consider the groom-to-be acceptable husband material? Does the good daughter elope, hoping for the best? Or does she marry the man daddy signs off on immaterial of his appeal for her? Just what kind of “personal” life can such a young woman hope to have when that life is essentially chosen for her?

Purity fathers may be convinced that they are really only doing their duties and looking after their little girls, but don’t these virginity pledges ultimately translate into an exercise in the power of male prerogative, and an insistence on a certain kind of cultural conformity? Aren’t they really an attempt to return American society to a supposedly more morally upright time--such as when men literally owned their wives and children?

At purity balls the fathers also take a pledge, to protect their girls—but who protects the girls from the fathers? What happens to the “pure” daughters of men who are sexual predators? or wife beaters? or self-loathing closet cases? or lying philanderers?

Is it possible that purity pledges really represent not just reliable parental squeamishness about pubescent sexuality in general, but also a new wrinkle in the same old determined resistance to issues of gender identity and alternative sexual preferences in particular?

Aren’t the purity daughters (and presumably, in the near future, sons) being asked—required, actually—to be not merely chaste but conventional? predictable? traditional? heterosexual??

Just asking...