I second that. Can I use it?
The thing about this that always disturbed me the most (and believe you me I am disturbed by the implication that a girl’s sexuality somehow vests in her male associates among other things - and we’re not even going into how profoundly disturbed I am by the whole women-as-chattel vibe this thing generates) is that this is just a whole lot of attention and hoorah being paid to a girl’s sexuality by her father.
I love my father deeply, but I do not now, nor did I ever, want him in any way involved in my sex life - even just swearing to help me protect my purity. I especially didn’t want this at a prepubescent age. The thought that my dad was contemplating my eventual sex life when I was eleven would have freaked me out mightily. It still freaks me out mightily actually and I’ve been married for six months.
It’s one thing to teach your children the values you and your spouse hold to - instilling a moral creed is probably the most important part of parenting. It is not, howsoever, a public event.
This little event is just pointless and creepy. If you haven’t given your daughter the tools she needs to make life decisions you feel are appropriate by the age of eleven, you just don’t have much chance of doing so. Expecting a child of that age to make a public vow they will be expected to live up to (or suffer the guilt of breaking) is ridiculous.
The pledge doesn’t sound strange to me at all. I was raised in a Christian household and we might’ve done this if we had the opportunity.
Though I’m no longer a believer of anything, I’ve never, ever regretted delaying sex. There were many situations when only my belief in waiting till marriage saved me from having the “we love each other so much, why not?” type of intercourse that so many teenage girls engage in.
I really had no idea that boys under a certain age universally lived for only one thing (not that it ever stops being important to them, but they at least become capable of love later on). If I were one of those uber-horny girls who had no problem with one night stands, then, yeah, it would’ve been different.
And what happens if somewhere along the way, the girl slips up, or what if she gets raped? Guess she can’t go to the Purity Ball any more. Now she’s no longer pure enough to get dressed up with Daddy & her sisters. Count me as someone who thinks your sexuality should be your business and no one else’s…that’s why they’re called “private” parts.
Even with the extra punctuation? :smack:
Mighty Girl, I’d be flattered.
dre2xl, I think saving yourself is great, as long as it’s *your * decision. But I still maintain that your “virtue” is yours to guard, not your father’s, and public declarations of him “guarding your virtue” would be creepy and, IMO, infantilizing at best, and proprietary at worst.
I still have no idea that that is the case. And I was once a teenage boy. You do realize that when you say someone is a girlfriend or a boyfriend, you’re saying you have a sexual relationship with them, right? It doesn’t mean you’re having vaginal intercourse, but it’s still a sexual relationship. Just because you hit a lot of triples, it doesn’t mean you’re Ty Cobb, you know.
I know that I have a dirty mind, but when I read this the only definition of “cover” that comes to mind is a stallion covering a mare, and that’s about what it seems like. If any parent should have a say in when a woman becomes sexually active, it should be the mother, and I’m not even saying that should happen. You teach your kids, you provide protection for them, you let them know what you think right and wrong is, and then you back the hell off and let them be their own person.
You don’t own them or their sexuality. You don’t force them to make a pledge in front of a bunch of strangers who will serve as nothing but a peanut gallery of shame.
The very idea makes me want to scrub my brain out with bleach.
I would never pit the decision to save yourself for marriage or commit to abstinence, ever. But what I do pit is the idea that unless you make this “pledge” public it somehow doesn’t count or isn’t as “meaningful”. And the father pledge is just screamingly archaic.
Euwww!
If a family wants to do something like this in private- well and good, it’s the “look at us everybody, aren’t we pious” thing that really gets me.
The sexism, misogyny and general “no will ever love you if you have sex” vibe are just the icing on the cake.
My father is someone who I know will always have my best interests at heart. He has enormous personal integrity- yet, you know what, he didn’t need to swear an oath and he has never got involved in my sex life. He gave me away on my wedding day, and I have never seen him happier or prouder- which had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I was a virgin.
Bra-freaking-vo!
I don’t mean to hijack this thread, but I find this as insulting to men as the issue at hand is insulting to women. I’m glad to know that at some point men overcome their animalistic need to put their penises in things and become able to have true feelings for people. I’m 26, am I old enough to love yet, or is my life still driven by my libido?
Sorry, I don’t usually get into the insults and such, but this is just stupid, and really gives away your biases. There you go assuming again. There is nothing in any of this about rape, it is only about choices to be made by the girls.
You guys are getting all het up about the fact that fathers want to guide their daughters to make good moral choices, according to their own lights. I really think you’re reading a lot more into this than is there. I won’t say that some of these parents won’t be stupid about things if the girls make choices they don’t approve, but parents are like that sometimes, even some who have no religious beliefs whatsoever. I just don’t see the “ownership” issues that many of you do. Fathers are promising to guide their children and try to lead them to make good choices. And they’re promising to do that by modeling their own accountability for them. Isn’t that what parents are supposed to do?
Yes, I do, as I said, still think there should be some equivalent for the boys, but the fact that this creeps you out, with sexual implications about fathers and daughters, says more about your own attitudes, I think, than about what’s really happening here.
And do you also have problems with first communion and confirmation ceremonies? Those are public statements of belief and intent, made by children.
Please spell out exactly what it is about the posters’ attitudes you think this says.
I think you might be misinterpreting a bit (or not, possibly). It seems to me that the issue for most is not one of ‘sexual implications about fathers and daughters.’ but about sexist implications about the male high priests of the home holding young women publically accountable and responsible for choices that they are probably not in a position age-wise to be making yet, and that they very likely feel obligated to attest to because of the lopsided power dynamic between young girls and the community headed by their fathers.
The rape issue begs the question: what is it about physical “purity” that is that important? If being raped leaves a person still in a position to make a choice to be “pure,” then what does being pure mean? Maybe it’s not about whether or not you’ve done ‘the deed,’ but more about with whom and in what context? In which case, what does physical “purity” have to do with anything? It’s a state of being that is utterly meaningless.
Children can make public statements of belief. They can do it in ritualized fashion and I don’t have much of a problem with it. But having someone make an oath to a community when they have no reasonable knowledge about what it is they’re promising seems coercive and sets up a horribly unreasonable expectation on a person to uphold that promise, regardless of age.
You aren’t the only one who thought that. I also have to wonder what’s really going on behind the scenes with some of those proudly covering papas.
nobody is getting heated up about that, fathers should help guide their daughters, as should the mothers. Where is the mom here? Why didnt the father say the same thing to the son? What right does any father have to hold their childs virginity in a chest for ‘safe keeping’? Who are they to decide that the guy their daughter marries is worthy of such a thing? What if he is an ass?
The whole thing is just so “old tyme” it makes me cringe. You want to be a good parent? Be a good parent and teach them to make right/wrong choices without the need for some pledge to corerce them. Whole idea is idiotic.
I’m getting all het up over the manner in which they do it.
A parent (or both parents) having a series of discussions with their sons and daughters explaining their beliefs, their values, and why they’d like their children to have those values - combined with the parents demonstrating those values and providing examples for their children through their lives, words, and actions wouldn’t be met with my derision.
But this? The pseudo-ceremonial aspect, the weirdness of the pledges (that wording bothers me), the missing sons (it takes two to tango), the missing mothers, all of that makes the whole thing incredibly creepy. (The actual wording of the pledge also strikes me as theologically suspect, too, and I’m coming from an evangelical background, but I’d have to think about exactly why some more.)
This ritual is a bit more than just that.
Whatever. But I still find it incredibly creepy. If I had a daughter, I’d feel creepy about promising to protect her vagina from the big, bad world, and I’d feel just as creepy if she pledged to me to keep her vagina in mint condition in its original wrapper, as DianaG so succinctly put it, until I handed her over to another man.
And the virtual absence of similar mother-son purity balls (I was able to turn up two such balls that were both father-daughter and mother-son by Googling, as opposed to scads of father-daughter only ceremonies, and no mother-son only balls) says that that’s what it’s all about: an attempt to return to the Good Old Days when virginity was an important asset in terms of getting a girl married off to a respectable man.
But they are not commitments. And the theoretical point, at least, of confirmation ceremonies is that the child’s of an age to confirm the expression of faith that was made on his/her behalf in baptism. (I personally think such ceremonies tend to come a wee bit early.)
They’re also not a public statement about one’s sexuality, which I find it extremely creepy to expect a kid to make, or for a parent (especially the parent of the opposite sex) to make to one’s child.
Finally, speaking as a Christian, I’m extremely uncomfortable with the notion of anyone who knows the Lord making this or any remotely similar commitment (most certainly including marriage vows) unless they believe that they are called to do so.
In that vein, I believe doing this sort of thing en masse, with the attendant social and quite possibly parental pressure for a young woman to make such a commitment, is wrong. Leave that sort of thing for the Moonies.
Ecch. The whole thing just gives me the willies.
Count me in with the creepy crowd, espcially the part about the “until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband”. I’ve head this attitude expressed before, usually in the words “your virginity is the best wedding gift you can give.” I’m sorry, my dashing good looks, sharp witticisms, loving heart and sheer brilliance are my best gift, not an unpoked pussy. If my most redeeming factor was the fact that I had never screwed…well, let’s just say thats not a flattering evaluation and it doesn’t really bod well for the rest of the duration of the marriage. And then we get in to the whole idea of “damaged goods”…
Yech.
Hear her, hear her.
Well said.