At Purity Balls, on the other hand, Daddy and His Little Princess participate in a formal ceremony during which they exchange rings and kisses on the mouth after she promises God & everyone else present that Daddy will be her "boyfriend" until she is given away to her future husband.
This is the belief system underlying patriarchy taken to its logical extreme: that a woman "belongs" to a man (a father, a husband, possibly later a son) who controls her sexuality. For all the problems and social injustices we face in the 21st century, most of us have come to recognize that no one can legitimately claim ownership of another person's (living) body.
I can almost guarantee that if my own father were still alive, he'd find "Purity Balls" as viscerally abhorrent as I do although he would have had a hard time articulating exactly why. Even attending my Campfire Girls' annual Father/Daughter Buffet was excruciating for the poor guy, although he enjoyed sharing activities in which our gender difference played no part (riding motorcycles, camping and boating). My father, for all his faults, was a man who absolutely respected his daughters' sexual and physical boundaries. (He could be a little uptight, in fact. Once, having returned home after a two year absence, I flung my arms around him at the airport and he was so mortified that it was like embracing a marble column.)
Neither did my father ever tell me I should expect to find a man who would treat me "like a queen." In fact, to the extent to which he advised me about my future, it was to nag me to take more math and science classes and quit wasting my time with my head in a novel, and not get married too early. Once, during a long car ride home from college, he confided that he hoped I would find a job I liked because "working would have made your mom a happier person."
In other words, my father more than anyone made me a feminist.
Someday, if I can do so tactfully, I'm going to ask my fundamentalist Christian neighbors what they think about these "purity" covenants. Or maybe I won't because... well, maybe there are some things I just shouldn't know.
Meanwhile, the little girl below is clearly having none of this nonsense!
