Some Christian communities say father-daughter purity balls are about much more than abstinence pledges—they’re an opportunity to talk openly about sex. Is that really the case?
Mainstream media tends to portray the Purity Ball movement as creepy, hopelessly archaic, even incestuous. Bill Maher once compared the phenomenon to the Taliban: “What era are we living in where the man passes the daughter from Dad to the husband?”
But the Ball’s originators and new facilitators say that’s not true: the event is just a way to turn the sex talk—an awkward but crucial moment for every father and daughter—into a celebration. It’s an opportunity for men to consider what it means to be a father, and for girls to think about the choices they’ll make in the future.
As the idea of the purity ball evolves, fathers are trying to retain the event’s positive aspects and replace the outmoded. But is this even possible? One thing is clear: the event helps fathers feel better about being fathers. Less clear is if the purity ball can ever really be a step toward honest, open communication—especially since signing an abstinence pledge is often an empty gesture— and whether the event actually gets in the way of the father’s desire to protect his daughter.
♦◊♦
A few vital basics are the same at every ball. The event takes place at a swanky venue, often a five-star hotel. The daughters dress up, dance with their fathers, smile for photographs, and eat a sit-down dinner. At some point in the midst of all the festivities, both fathers and daughters participate in a ceremony honoring “purity.” The terms of the covenants signed or promises proclaimed are vague, focused more on a girl’s “state of mind” than state of hymen, but the message is clear: the father will do his best to make sure that his daughter will not have sex before marriage.
“We don’t consider purity balls a rite of passage,” explained Randy Wilson, originator of the Purity Ball movement. “This is just a way to celebrate the importance of the relationship between the father and the daughter.” Wendy Harris, mother of two Ball-goers, said she initially thought the idea was “a little odd” but that she wanted her daughters “to understand how much their father cared about them, and they both loved the idea of getting dressed up for a night on the town with their dad.” As an added bonus, she said, “my husband got the chance to discuss what we all know is a really uncomfortable issue for most fathers and daughters. Everyone has fun and feels more at ease. What’s the problem?”
Every parent I interviewed said their daughters were more than willing to attend. “The girls view it as a chance to invite their friends to come, get new dresses, and spend time with their dads,” said Steven Brown, a doctor and Purity Ball organizer from Texas. “If you make a girl do this it doesn’t mean anything. It has to be her decision.” A purity pledge on its own, he said, is a waste of time: “Any pledge to maintain sexual integrity should be in the context of open, honest communication about sexual issues.” Alison, his daughter and one-time Purity Ball date, agrees. “I didn’t put a lot of emphasis on signing a piece of paper,” she told me. “The Purity Ball was fun, but it wasn’t a new concept.”
So maybe it’s unsurprising that none of the girls I spoke with could remember exactly what their pledge entailed. Even most fathers said the act of signing a covenant doesn’t really mean anything on its own. Greg Frost, a father who attended one of Brown’s events, said he doesn’t think the covenant makes a difference. If his daughters had premarital sex, “they’d be disappointed in themselves anyway.”
In a way, the event reminded me of Greek life in college—how sorority girls I knew would routinely dismiss the organization’s weird initiation rites and secret handshakes in the name of new friends and access to exclusive parties. With purity balls, however, there’s way more than Frat Row at stake. Why would fathers throw a party in the name of “purity”—an issue that, however nebulously defined, is clearly a crucial concern for these fathers and their families—but then downplay the importance of the event? What kind of message does that send their daughters?
♦◊♦
The man behind the Ball
Wilson, a Colorado-based pastor and father of seven, co-founded the Purity Ball movement with his wife, Lisa, to “find a way to help our children understand life and relationships.”
“We’re dealing with a lost generation of daughters,” he said. “They’re waiting to be loved, valued, and rescued from a culture that’s devouring them as physical objects.”
Only fathers are asked to sign a pledge in Wilson’s ceremony, which reads as such:
I, (daughter’s name)’s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband, and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide, and pray over my daughter and my family as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.
If the ceremony is meant to help daughters, why does it focus on the fathers’ actions? Wilson maintains that it’s to prevent daughters from feeling guilty about future or even past sexual transgressions. “In some Purity Balls,” he explained, “it’s more about the woman’s physical aspects than the emotional. We’ve always held that this is a fatherhood event. … We don’t want to make girls feel guilty, we would never talk about abstinence, we never talk about the physical purity of the girl.”
Instead of signing a covenant, the daughters symbolically and silently “commit to live pure lives” by laying down white roses in front of a cross. But exactly what are they committing? Wilson said the event—which girls sometimes call a “Cinderella Night”—isn’t “about abstinence at all.” Instead, it’s about “extravagant beauty,” a phrase Wilson used multiple times to refer not only to the event itself but women in general, Israeli temples, the Garden of Eden, and the glamorous hotel they host their ball in.
But to say the night “isn’t about abstinence” is more than hard to believe; it’s confusingly contradictory. Almost or at least equally unsettling is Wilson’s tendency to use “beauty” as a stand-in for other, more difficult to define concepts. Most fathers would agree with Wilson’s belief that dads should have good relationships with their daughters so that they don’t seek validation elsewhere, but the way Wilson explains it is, once again, bewildering: “The female is desperate to have an answer to her question, Is she valuable? Is she beautiful? And those are both the same.”
But value and beauty are not the same, and one would expect Wilson—the founder of an event that aims to foster girls’ self esteem to discourage their seeking validation via sexual activity—not to throw those words around so casually. What message does the Purity Ball send young women when they are no longer twirling with their daddies in fancy dresses, when they are confronted with hard choices that require speaking, not symbolism? What happens when their fathers aren’t there to protect them anymore?
Wilson’s heart may be in the right place, but his ceremony doesn’t seem to help daughters as much as help fathers feel better about being fathers. And for any father to truly help protect his daughter as per Wilson’s pledge—regardless of how strongly he supports or opposes the abstinence movement—he must work with her to decide what purity and integrity truly entail.
I left this same comment on spinoff post, but it applies here so I’m reposting: I grew up in this “Purity Culture.” There is a very, very dark side. The idea that “the greatest gift a bride can give her husband is her virginity” really reduces the value of a girl to what is between her legs. And then you add in the “Dad” factor and things get really weird. In the name of protecting his daughter’s purity, a dad hyper-focuses on her sexuality. All he sees when he looks at her is sex. It gets really, really messed up.… Read more »
Anything that doesnt go with what this world tells you is called weird or crazy. I wish I had something like this growing up. When I was younger my friends around me slept with people all the time. And we were only teens. I only 4 so far at that time but thats too much! My friends had way more sexual partners than me. My cousins had kids young ended up with stds. So whats wrong with telling your child to wait? What are the consequences of purity???? What .. not knowing how to have sex? Uh We know how… Read more »
Not to mention the whole “she must respond to her father’s leadership until she’s under her husband’s leadership.”
Yeah, minors should respond to their parents’ leadership, but then to her husband’s leadership? What century is this???
Just reinforces the double standard in today”s society – that girls are expected to wait and . . . boys will be boys. And some of the language sounds borderline pornographic – “cover my daughter as her father.” As long as only girls are expected to wait until marriage, there will be no boys waiting on them.
…boys will be boys….
More like boys should not be waiting if they expect to be considered men.
Wow. It’s unbelievable that parts of society still live in the stone age and think sex makes a man.
If I hadn’t lived it personally of hadn’t heard a lot of other men tell it I’d probably be inclined to believe it either.
Correction.
…..be inclined to not believe it either.
I usually would eschew the word “creepy.” But THIS is creepy.
I find if offensive that society has crap like Purity Balls for girls but nothing that parents want their boys to go to. I know society today makes it seems cool for guys to be man-whores and yes it’s in their DNA to want sex and conquest blah blah blah but they’re not cave anymore, they’ve evolved and can control themselves. Boys should also be taught the value of sex and all the same stuff girls are taught about it’s being an expression of love and how you should wait until you’re love with someone. I will never encourage my… Read more »
The best thing a man can do for his daughter is to teach his son to respect women. All this talk about keeping girls pure, who is talking to boys about respecting women outside his own family?
I’d say that teaching boys to follow their own way when it comes to relationships with women (instead of giving into what various forms of media tell them such relationships should be like) would come before what you say. If they aren’t able to be themselves and respect themselves there’s not much hope for their relationships with women. One big problem is that respect is actually being beaten into the heads of some boys to the point that I think it back fires and they react violently when things go wrong. I think the key to helping boys is to… Read more »
If fathers want to connect with their daughters, they should go outside and throw a baseball or kick a soccer ball. Also, placing emphasis on sexual purity only reinforces the idea that a girl is defined by her body, rather than taking the focus off sexuality.
Do I need a purity ball to talk with my daughter? No. But I did take her to a Father-Daughter Valentine’s Day dance at the Y years ago. Does that make me creepy? Not to me; not to her. It seems like the writer of this piece had an axe to grind before the story was written. Those aspects of the story which support her perspective are emphasized; those which are not fall into the background. She takes a presumed position of superior knowledge and sophistication which, in my view, demeans the motives and actions of both fathers and daughters… Read more »
Nothing wrong with father-daughter dances. They’re lovely. What makes them creepy *is* the purity ball aspect. You know what is great? Finding stuff that both the dad and daughter really like without having any ideological bent. You know – like talking about books, painting, cooking, building neat shit in the back yard, camping? Fun?
Wow, what incredibly bad wording on Wilson’s pledge. For a father to “cover” his daughter? “Cover” is a term for breeding livestock. Wow.
From what I have read, children who sign abstinence pledges are more likely to suffer unintended pregnancies. They feel too guilty about what they’re doing to think clearly. So they don’t consider the importance of using birth control/protection.
Wilson says that girls are just “waiting to be loved.” Well, quit making them wait. Love your kids; no gowns required.
Why can’t they have these father-daughter dances without the abstinence pledges? Then you have quality time without the creepiness.
this!
Seconded. Who doesn’t like a dinner dance? Dress up, eat something fancy, chat to other people, inevitably dance to the Proclaimers. How is that *not* a good night? And if your dad is an awesome guy who’s great to spend time with, it’s a top night out.
My dad and I bonded by going fishing and drinking beer. I think that was a far more fun, and way less creepy, way to build a relationship in my teens.
What a pity that dads who want to be men of integrity, and examples to their daughters of the kind of good men they can expect their own husbands or boyfriends to be, are being confused with this silliness. It speaks volumes that this is not an “Integrity Ball”.
It is a pity but we can take comfort in how few people really do confuse men of integrity with this conservative-Christian pap.
“The reason that a girl decides to wait sexually is because she knows her value. And this is an opportunity for the father to really hit home how valuable she is.”
She knows her value, all right. She knows her father and everyone around her think her value lies between her legs (and in her “beauty”). What a disgusting message for a dad to give a daughter. It’s possible to let girls know they have sexual agency (and sexuality) and can therefore make informed decisions about their own sex lives–which may include being abstinent. This is the opposite of that.
Well said Sarah!
Why do you need a “Purity Ball” to talk about these issues with your daughters? I have a 15 year old. Since she was 12, her mother and I have spoken with her about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. So far, she hasn’t gotten pregnant or been arrested. I’m wary of anything, church sponsored or not, that screams “LOOK AT WHAT GOOD PARENTS WE ARE”. I dance with my daughters almost every day, when they let me. I also talk to them about the music they listen to, the boys and girls they hang with, and what constitutes good… Read more »
rawk!
I’m not totally sold on these, but for fathers and daughters who have a healthy relationship, there is something to be said on the father’s part about “don’t let anybody cross your boundaries of intimacy who doesn’t love you as much as I do.”
Why, though? What if your daughter *wants* to become intimate with someone she doesn’t love? What if she fancies a one night stand, or a “friend with benefits”? OK, it’s uncomfortable to think of your little girl having a sexual appetite, later on – but that’s the _parent’s_ problem, not the daughter’s.
I have no discomfort whatsoever at the prospect of my daughter engaging in sex for its own sake. It didn’t hurt me or anyone else.
Let me answer just based on the headline, without reading: NOOOOOooooooooo! Now let me read it. …okay, that was actually a pretty great article. I think that abstinence only education, the reinforcing of the whore/madonna complex, the dichotomy between female sexual purity & male sexual conquest, male authority & female subservience, all that stuff, is deeply deeply messed up & wrong. That being said, I think having a good relationship with your daughter is a noble goal, & just because I disagree with your ideology doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to have it– I have my right to… Read more »