Christian Virgins are Overrated (Morford)

"There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country.

Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys, but rather fancy creepy dress-up rituals taking place in towns like Colorado Springs and Tucson and Zoloft Jesusville, in which Christian dads rent a bad tux while their daughters, mostly teenagers but many as young as 6 or 7, get all dolled up in gowns from JCPenny and they all drive out to the airport Marriott and prepare to, well, lose their minds.

It begins. At some point the daughter stands up, her pale arms wrapped around her daddy, and reads aloud a formal pledge that she will remain forever pure and virginal and sex-free until she is handed over, by her dad (who is actually called the "high priest" of the home), like some sort of sad hymenic gift, to her husband, who will receive her like the sanitized and overprotected and libidinously inept servant she so very much is. Praise!
--more--
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/05/12/notes051206.DTL&nl=fix

if someone wishes to save themselves for marriage, that is their private business, not something that should be forced on a person, or stated publically.

Are usually people who either couldn't get laid anyway, or people who are just lying and have sex anyway, but say they are pure.

I knew a lot of people in the latter.

But, almost 100% of the time, the announcement is made not because of any committment to morlaity or to God and Jesus, but as an act of self-promotion and self-importance.

per their web site pictures :rofl:

And that was in 2002...

Or do they charge a bride price? :sarcasm:

I thought at first glance it had something to do with new packaging for laundry soap, and then, when I realized the context of the phrase, I thought it was some odd chastity device, that, the minute a lad tried to wander around down south, as it were, he'd come across a set of attachable gonads that would put him off (or not, nowadays!)....

It's a good article on the subject, though. I found this bit quite compelling:

Voilà, the standard recipe for emotional, physical and spiritual catastrophe, for roughly 17 years of vague marital misery capped off by divorce and much therapy and four unhappy children and the profound and aching need located somewhere deep beneath the pelvic bone to try something, anything new and different and sexually liberating.

Let's just say it outright: The superiority of virginity myth, it is a massive, underreported disaster. It is a ridiculous and exhausting misconception that must be eradicated like a cancer. Perhaps French philosopher Voltaire said it best, nearly 300 years ago: "It is one of the great superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue." So true.

Which is another way of asking, Don't we have it exactly backward? Shouldn't one's overall happiness -- physical, marital or otherwise -- be directly equated with exceptional amounts of sexual training and education and awareness? Is such positively libidinous education not a recipe for health and well-being and long-term marital satisfaction? You already know the answer.

Look, the plague of sexual incompetence plagues our land like a plague. It infects our schools, our popular culture, our presidential administration. The right endorses wanton sexual stupidity (and all ensuing miseries, drug addictions, divorces, stresses, gun fetishes, online porn obsessions) through failed abstinence programs, STD misinformation, refusal to support quality birth control and the relentless repetition of lies about sin and depravity and a shocking ignorance of the transformative spiritual power of sex. Purity Balls? Nothing but a sad celebration of that exact ignorance....

silly me :hi:

of something George Clooney said about the cockamamie idea that jihadis spend eternity in paradise with 72 virgins. I don't remember his exact phrasing, but the gist was that virgins weren't his idea of paradise: he wanted experienced pros!

There's one other thing I would like to know about this. Do the promoters acknowledge the existence of incest? Do they hold the dads accountable, or is it all nudge-nudge-wink-wink for abusive fathers?

... have they instituted 'Purity Balls' for men and their sons, too? Where the boys swear to keep their pants zipped until that awkward night when neither party knows what they're doing? And their fathers telling them to take up whittling and cold showers instead?

I'm a bit surprised there are *any* virgins left, whether Christian or otherwise....

I think he makes some great points too.


i wonder - would we be as oversexualized as a society if we were actually getting laid a lot more and satisfactorily?