Heads up: You may have really, really strong opinions about what I’ve written here. I’d like to hear them. Because if you’re reading this, you’re obviously a thoughtful, well-considered person and I always want to hear what thoughtful, well-considered people have to say.

The other day an acquaintance mentioned, quite in passing, the concept of the Purity Ceremony, or Purity Ball.
I was going to link to a reference to it in Wikipedia, but there wasn’t much of substance in there, and the biggest part of it was the criticism, and that didn’t seem fair.

Which is ironic, because I’m going to criticize it, too.

The whole idea is that the young woman pledges to her parents that she’ll remain a virgin until she marries, and her parent (usually her father) pledges to guard her virginity until she marries.

Now, I’m certainly in favor of being clean. I even think it’s a good idea to wait until marriage before having sex, an opinion that I formed over the years watching my friends work through their relationships, watching myself work through relationships, and losing my brother to a venereal disease, a disease that can best be prevented by having sex with only one partner who has only had sex with you.

Since I can’t go back in time and re-do my past, I have shared my observations and life lessons with my kids. I have framed those observations as advice, and since I talk so much I should go to On and On Anon, they’ve heard that advice a lot.

So you might think that I’d be a big fan of the whole Purity Ball idea. But I’m not, for a few reasons:

1. The only person my kid should be pledging purity to is him- or herself. It’s not my life that will be seriously re-directed if he or she gets some girl pregnant, or gets pregnant, or contracts a disease. They need to be making promises to themselves, because themselves are the ones who will be affected the most by their decisions.

2. Where’s the Purity Ball for the boy? Everything I read about these things suggests that the whole affair (pardon the pun) is aimed at the girl. Which makes sense: if girls won’t put out, boys get to be pure, too, by default. But I find the whole ‘fix the problem by manipulating the girl’ solution to be insulting to the boy. It assumes that boys can’t/won’t ever get their minds off sex, so we’ll control the problem by controlling the vendor, if you will. I reject the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality, as it tends to prohibit applying pressure and responsibility so that boys will become men.

3. How in the heck does a Dad guard his daughter’s virginity? You can’t follow your teen everywhere. Are we suggesting that there’s no dating until Dad picks out her husband, and then even those dates are chaperoned? I’m not even going to get into the logistical challenges presented by this scenario, and focus in on the larger issue: if your kid does the ‘right’ thing because they’ve never been allowed to do anything else (i.e. you’ve had them under complete surveillance and they know it), it has much less value than your kid doing the ‘right’ thing because it was the ‘right’ thing.  And sometimes it takes doing the ‘wrong’ thing to figure out that the ‘right’ thing is actually the ‘right’ thing, which is a very good lesson and I should know because it’s the freakin’ story of my life.

4. I find the symbolism of Dad having this kind of ceremony with his daughter unsettling. These things are frequently structured to look just like a wedding. With your dad? Really?

It occurred to me to see if there are any studies around the effectiveness of the Purity Ball concept. I couldn’t find any. And then I decided (Warning! Heresy Alert!) that I didn’t care if they’re effective or not.

Because for me, the means don’t justify the ends. I’m not going to stand guard over my teens’ decisions like a watchdog, nor am I going to ask them to promise anything to me at all. If attending a Purity Ball would guarantee me that my kids wouldn’t get knocked up or knock someone else up, I’d still reject it. Duct taping them to their bed would guarantee the same thing, but I’d reject that, too.