The Purity Myth
purity ball, too? Because it’s not up to young men to stay “pure.” They just have to seek out a wife who is.” 10
    † Subtlety is a bit lost on the virginity movement, especially when it comes to any kind of
    phallic symbol.
    # When I first came across purity balls, I wondered if my feminism had jaded me too much. Maybe these were just daddy/daughter dances that I was imbuing with sexual meaning. So I showed my father some video footage of a purity ball and asked what he thought. The color drained from his face and he just said, “Jessica, that’s truly fucking weird.”

    jessica valenti 67
    “affirm [their] femininity.”* The promotional materials that describe these dates use language that one would think would make participants uneasy, but instead are positioned as sweet and doting:

    Katie giggles as she waits for her date to come around and open the car
    door. The pair enters an ice cream shop. She sits down at the table as her
    date gently pushes in her chair. He takes her hand from across the table and asks, “What f lavor would you like tonight, Sugar?” Katie smiles and says,
    “I’ ll have chocolate, Daddy.” More and more fathers are becoming aware of their inf luence and are regularly dating their daughters.” 14

    Dating their daughters? Isn’t it possible to encourage fathers to spend more time with their daughters without using language usually reserved for romantic relationships? Neutral, family-based rhetoric would probably be just as effective and would certainly be less, well, creepy. But calling daddy/ daughter quality time “dates” speaks volumes about how young women are valued in the virginity movement—for their sexuality.
    While I was researching purity balls, this quote from Wesley Tullis, who has taken both of his daughters to the events, really stuck with me: “It is impos- sible to convey what I have seen in their sweet spirits, their delicate, forming souls, as their daddy takes them out for their first, big dance. Their whole being absorbs my loving attention, resulting in a radiant sense of self-worth and iden- tity . ” 15 There’s no doubt that a loving relationship between father and daughter can be a wonderful thing. But just how healthy is it to conflate virginity with “self-worth” and “identity,” and paternal attention with sexuality?

    * In the world of the virginity movement, “femininity” is synonymous with submissive- ness and girlishness.

68 the Purity myth
    In fact, it’s difficult to watch videos of purity balls, or read the “dat- ing your daughter” literature, and not think about these pseudo-incestuous themes—and whether they might be connected to real-life abuse.
    In a piece in The New York Times on purity balls, Judith Warner notes that even if there is no crime in these events, “there is nonetheless a kind of horror to [fathers’] obsession with their daughters’ sexuality”:

    Judith Lewis Herman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, whose work with and writings on incest victims in the 1980s revo-
    lutionized the understanding of the crime and its perpetrators, believes that incest, like rape generally, has to be viewed within a wider context of power relations. Incest, she says, is “an abuse of patriarchal power,” a criminal per- version of fatherly control and inf luence. It is perpetrated, in many cases, by men who present themselves as the guardians of the moral order. 16

    The Wilsons, however, insist that purity balls and virginity pledges aren’t about focusing on girls’ sexuality. “Of course, we want to do everything we can to help them enter marriage as pure, as whole persons,” Lisa said in a 2001 Gazette article. “But it’s not just physical. It’s moral and emotional purity.” 17
    Yet again, the foundation of a girl’s “moral and emotional purity” and her ability to be a “whole” person is boiled down to her being a virgin! While proponents of date nights and purity

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