The religious politics of puritan purity

The description of the daughter as her father’s “date” is not journalistic licence from Baumgartner. That’s the way that daughters are referred to when spending “daddy time” in these circles. And girls as young as four accompany their fathers to Purity Balls, though apparently it’s thought to be more appropriate just after menarche for the pledge of sexual purity and reciprocal virginal defence to be taken.

Though these balls are very much an invented tradition, and I doubt also that pledges to “save my first kiss for my wedding night” were ever encouraged in actually existing traditional families, there’s something genuinely traditional about the notion that a father owns his daughter’s sexuality:

The older girls at the Broadmoor tonight are themselves curvaceous and sexy in backless dresses and artful makeup; next to their fathers, some look disconcertingly like wives. In fact, in the parlance of the purity ball folks, one-on-one time with dad is a “date,” and the only sanctioned one a girl can have until she is “courted” by a man. The roles are clear: Dad is the only man in a girl’s life until her husband arrives, a lifestyle straight out of biblical times. “In patriarchy, a father owns a girl’s sexuality,” notes psychologist and feminist author Carol Gilligan, PhD “And like any other property, he guards it, protects it, even loves it”.

The anti-Paris pledge movement is relatively mainstream in America now - some studies suggest up to 10 per cent of American teens have taken virginity pledges. Other longitudinal studies on the pledgers show that 88 per cent of them have sex within three years of pledging. Disturbingly, STD rates are much higher for pledgers than the general population - a reflection of the fact that any discussion of safe sex is thought just to encourage sex. There are as yet no studies on those who’ve gone through the whole Purity Ball ritual.

So what do we have here? Two ostensibly politically opposed groups within society both believing that sex and sexualisation are massive problems for adolescents and pre-adolescents.

On the left, the Australia Institute crew believe that materialism and capitalism are to blame. On the right, it’s the decline of morality and the evils of liberalism, and the lack of religiosity.

In both instances, the target of the critique is individualism and choice - though it’s choice expressed through consumption in the first instance, and choice expressed through adolescent sexuality in the second. While these positions are somewhat polarised (and, as I’m arguing, the hype over the influence of advertising and pop culture is often talked up precisely to sell magazines and newspapers and thus more advertising space), there’s a strange parallelism going on.

I’m not meaning to suggest that cultural mores regarding children, adolescents and sexuality haven’t shifted. I’m not suggesting that advertising and pop culture don’t have a role to play. What I am suggesting is that in order to have an informed debate on these issues, and to think about their implications, is that we need less hype and more evidence and judicious discussion.

One of the interesting things about Baumgartner’s article is the way that she allows girls at the Purity Balls to speak for themselves. There’s a danger in assuming that children lack autonomy and agency - obviously they require protection in many instances but that’s not to say that their own beliefs and choices should just be legislated or proclaimed out of existence. And if we’re not to fall into the trap of seeing only evil everywhere as the Religious Right do, we need to know much more empirically what the situation as it stands is.