http://www.glamour.com/news/articles/2007/01/purityballs07feb

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Originally posted by Martha (but not Stewart):
This is so creepy I don't know where to begin.

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Martha, not a bad comment.

However, I just read the article, it seems to be all about control, the father controls until husband takes over. When will these wingnut religions learn that males and females are equal and should make their own decisions.

I didn't notice any incest implication, perhaps I should re-read it, but once is really enough.

[ 08 February 2007: Message edited by: oreobw ]

[ 08 February 2007: Message edited by: oreobw ]

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Originally posted by oreobw:
I didn't notice any incest implication, perhaps I should re-read it, but once is really enough.

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Oh, I guess it's just my bad habit of looking for subliminal messages. I didn't read past the first two paras:

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Would you pledge your virginity to your father?[...]

I watch as the gray-haired man next to me reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a small satin box and flips it open to check out a gold ring he’s about to place on the finger of the woman sitting to his right. Her eyes well up with tears as she is overcome by emotion.

The man’s date? His 25-year-old daughter.[...]

“Are you ready to war for your daughters’ purity?”

Purity balls

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And then that photo...

Based on research from Dr. Sandi Byers at UNB, the government found that a vast majority of people in the province (in all areas of the province) wanted more sex-ed taught in the schools and for that education to be more detailed.

Religious leaders lost it. With a lot of help from an abstinence-only advocacy group from Maine, those groups packed public meetings about the topic and flooded radio call-in shows (it was an impressive display of PR, actually). To the government's credit, it trusted Dr. Byers research and did not back down--the silent majority won the day.

At any rate...one of the most interesting things about the virginity pledge movement is that it is incredibly ineffective

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Originally posted by unionist:

Call me twisted.

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....Previous studies have found that teenagers who make pledges contract STDs at nearly the same rate as those who don't, but that they have fewer sexual partners, are less likely to use condoms and more likely to engage in anal or oral sex....

....Bearman said. "Pledging leads to a form of promise-breaking that's riskier."

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Originally posted by unionist:
Yeah - where's Mommy in this picture??? "Save yourself for Daddy" just has way too many layers of meaning...

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Originally posted by unionist:
Yeah - where's Mommy in this picture???

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Originally posted by unionist:
Maybe Mommy is still a virgin? Modern medicine and Christian evangelism can work miracles!

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You're right, wrong forum for jokes against the U.S. right

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I disagree. And think this statement now feeds into the feminists-don't-have-a-sense-of-humour thing. Not meaning to make you feel bad, but ...

My reaction has more to do with the dominating naughty-haw-haw jokiness that seems to be taking over this thread.

Like this isn't real shit in real people's lives. Like it isn't a nightmare to live in a pretty family that presents well in public, and has some very nasty secrets living behind the door.

[ 08 February 2007: Message edited by: writer ]

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Originally posted by jas:
[QB..In other words, "yes I'm a virgin." (That thing Daddy...did to me doesn't count)..a really great way for a Dad to psychologically cover up sexual abuse.[/QB]

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An extremely good way to cover up sexual abuse/incest. The article says that many young girls do not even know what they are signing. So in reality those girls are signing purity pledges to their fathers who yet do not know what it means. How opportune for those fathers who “want” their daughters. Just tell them it means; “I own your sex, and I get to use until you have a husband.”

Just a quibble with the snip you left about STD's being equal in prevuious studies.

The article said this:

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Disturbingly, the adolescent health study also found that STD rates were significantly higher in communities with a high proportion of pledgers. “Pledgers are less likely than nonpledgers to use condoms, so if they do have sex it is less safe,” says Peter Bearman, Ph.D., a Columbia University sociologist who helped design the study. For these teens, he believes, it’s a mind game: If you have condoms, you were planning to have sex. If you don’t, sex wasn’t premeditated, which makes it more OK. The study also found that even pledgers who remained virgins were highly likely to have oral and anal sex—risky behavior given that most probably didn’t use condoms to cut their risk.

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When reading this thread, before I read the article I had thought or sure they are keeping their "skin intact" but doing everything else. And sure enough, that was what was found.

The end of the article was fairly good, and it is what many women need to embrace:

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I want to take every one of those girls aside and whisper to them the real secret of womanhood: The key to any treasure you’ve got is held by one person—you.

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Originally posted by writer:
Oh, and incest isn't restricted to the right.

[ 08 February 2007: Message edited by: writer ]

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no, but it should be restricted to the wrong.

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I just read the article, it seems to be all about control, the father controls until husband takes over.

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Or as the line from a great traditional Ontario song put it:

"We're slaves to our fathers until we are wives, then slaves to our husbands the rest of our lives..."

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Originally posted by writer:
Then there's men dominating a thread in a left-wing feminism forum discussion about religious men dominating their daughters and wives.

Yeah, it isn't just a right issue.

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What I found interesting though, in reading the dominent male voice here, is that, first those responding found it reprehensible, and immediately condemned the practise of this, a good thing and thank you gentlemen, but then immediately divorced themselves from any further discussion. Also, they did not really condemn the fathers though. Except by way of addressing that some fathers will use this for the purposes of furthering incest ability.

Only 1 addressed the stripping away of a woman's right of self determination and empowerment.

One of many so-called natalist groups is Quiverfull.

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Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship - "Father knows best" - and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess's 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the "Great Physician" and sole "Birth Controller," opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women's attempts to control their own bodies - the Lord's temple - are a seizure of divine power.

Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception - adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes - and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.

The Nation

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Originally posted by writer:
Then there's men dominating a thread in a left-wing feminism forum discussion about religious men dominating their daughters and wives.

Yeah, it isn't just a right issue.

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Excuse me, I meant my post to be sympathetic to and in solidarity with the victims of the type of thinking the OP was talking about.

And yes, there have been a lot of men posting in this thread, but, other than the silly sophmoric posts early on, the men who've posted have been on the anti-hypocrisy, pro-woman side of the issue.

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Originally posted by remind:

Also, they did not really condemn the fathers though.

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I, like most people, I suspect, came to the thread thorough TAT. I rarely look to see what forum a topic is in.

I distanced myself from the discussion because I didn't feel I had anymore to add.

When I was reading the story (which was very well written, IMO), I was thinking to myself that its all well and nice to spend a nice night out with your daughter, but could you not have an event like this without the strings? Why does it have to be a "purity ball?" Why not just, I don't know, an "Isn't my daughter a wonderful person? I'm so happy to be spending this night with her ball?"

There is no doubt that there is some woman as property attitudes inherent in the purity movement. However, based on what I learned while following the NB story I referenced above, the purity people are after the boys too (although I acknowledge that the external pressures a boy faces are much different that a girl. A boy that breaks his pledge, generally speaking, is likely less affected than a girl who did would be).

Again, not realizing that it was the feminism forum, I chose to look at the issue more from the overall abstinence/purity movement than a purely feminist one. I did so simply because that's the angle I am most knowledgeable about.

It appears that at least some of the fathers quoted in this article believe in arranged marriages

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"...She believes, and I do too, that her husband will come through our family connections or through me before her heart even gets involved.”

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I was wondering something else, which might sound like a poor joke, but it is not my intention... if all the emphasis is on the girls remaining "pure" until marriage but not on the boys, then in their crazy world who are the boys supposed to be making out with?

Or maybe the boys are supposed to remain "pure" as well?

(Hard to believe these people are in the 21st century in North America).

[ 08 February 2007: Message edited by: oreobw ]

In other words...

She's a GROWN WOMAN.

At that age, how dare her father ask her to pledge anything?

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
The scary part is, they don't stop at "pre-pubescent" girls..The daughter in the picture that accompanied the article was TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD!

At that age, how dare her father ask her to pledge anything?

There is something really disturbing in that particular father-daughter relationship.

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