Since their 1998 debut in Colorado Springs, Purity Balls have become a highly anticipated annual event for father-daughter pairs within the evangelical community. Dressed in formal attire — the glitz, glamour, and elaborate gowns — giddy young girls arrive for a wedding-like evening of festivities: a father-daughter waltz, a three-course meal and wedding cake, and a joint commitment to purity before God. Fathers pledge to protect their daughters’ purities and serve as models of integrity for their families, and young girls lay a white rose on a cross to silently symbolize their pledge to this so-called virtue.
The event’s creators, Randy and Lisa Wilson, intend for Purity Balls to “address the relationship between fathers and daughters” and “help daughters remain sexually pure until marriage.” Despite this emphasis on fostering a healthy father-daughter relationship, the language of purity pledges and its reception among adolescent girls has strong implications for a gendered hierarchy of authority. Rooted in the ideological infrastructure of the Evangelist Purity Movement, Purity Balls forward essentialist rhetoric that commodifies women’s sexuality, grants them the onus of sexual responsibility and risks their sexual health.
As a response to the increasing sexual and gender freedom in contemporary America, the 1990s Evangelical Purity Movement focused on launching abstinence education initiatives in schools, government, and health organizations, encouraging educators and parents to play an active role in youth chastity pledges. Spearheading the movement, national organizations such as True Love Waits and LifeWay distributed purity pledges in popular magazines. They hosted national conferences to teach adolescents the powerful rewards of chastity: “eternal love” for girls and authentic manhood for boys. In a more explicit patriarchal iteration of “purity culture,” fundamentalist preacher Bill Gothard argued for “biblical courtship,” where women submit to the “covering of authority” and “umbrella of protection” of her husband or father.
An overt manifestation of evangelical purity culture, Purity Balls forward fundamentalist notions of hierarchized gender roles within marriage and society. Gothard’s language is enacted nearly verbatim in Purity Balls, where fathers pledge to be the “covering of authority,” “high priest of the home,” and “protector of purity” for their daughters. Purely Woman, written by the daughters of the Purity Ball creators, defines “covering” as a comforting blanket of fatherly authority, under which it is the womanly duty and role to learn submission and obedience.
Randy Wilson relinquished “all control” over his daughter’s “incredible fragileness” to her husband when conducting his daughter’s wedding. By defining marriage as a transfer of control from father to husband, Purity Balls assign a submissive role to women within their relationships with men, thereby speaking fundamentalist postulates of ‘biblical courtship’ into existence.
By placing the burden of sexual responsibility on women, purity culture encourages the socialization of men and women into dichotomous extremes, in which women are taught to be gatekeepers of men’s behavior. On the other hand, men are taught to believe their sexual desires are uncontrollable. Many fathers participate in Purity Balls to protect their daughters from heartbreak or sexual abuse. Although this rationale represents a valid desire to protect children from sexualization and violence, Purity Balls do not make attempts to address real causes of sexual violence in America. Ignoring the possibility of sexual activity between young couples and failing to require abstinence pledges from young boys, Purity Balls promote the notion that preventing sexual violence exclusively resides in a woman’s ability to resist men’s sexual urges. The discourse of purity culture thereby forwards a dangerous myth: a purity pledge is a more effective barricade against abuse than a substantive sexual education.
Rooted in purity culture’s general resistance against comprehensive sexual education, Purity Balls function to keep adolescent girls naive to sexual desire and make its discussion taboo, creating detrimental outcomes for young people’s sexual health. The event’s main participants are homeschooled young girls with abstinence education, whose commitments to chastity are grounded in their limited understanding of sexuality and the mechanics of sex. The material effects are extremely worrisome. Teenage virginity pledgers, socialized to embrace a narrow definition of sex as purely vaginal intercourse, are more likely to engage in oral and anal sex, increasing their chances of contracting STDs. Pledgers are also less likely to practice consistent contraceptive use or get tested for STDs, increasing their likelihood of contraction and transmission.
The dangerous manifestations of purity culture reveal a fundamental contradiction within its rhetoric: how can purity culture place adolescent girls on a moral pedestal, while concurrently trading them as commodities between men? Although certain motives behind Purity Balls are commendable — uniting families, strengthening father-daughter relationships, and encouraging children to make wise decisions — the tradition creates a damaging rhetoric surrounding women’s sexual health and freedom.
The rhetoric behind abstinence movements has also led to improvident government policy. For example, states that prioritize abstinence education tend to receive less federal funding for teen sexual education programs, despite having higher rates of teen pregnancy. To create honest and productive discourse around gender and sexuality within religious communities and American society writ large, youth must be given the proper tools to make informed decisions about their sexual health, and with that, the agency to make choices about their sexual behavior. Universalizing comprehensive sexual education would transform the way abstinence movements are understood, grant young women the impetus to envision a future built on their religious autonomy and break dichotomous definitions of purity that devalue women.
