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Sigmund Freud’s Junior Prom
By Ned | May 19, 2008
That’s all I could think of when I saw this article on Purity Balls (via Alex). What’s obviously intended to be a PG-rated celebration of traditional family values instead comes off as a hilariously awful nightmare parade of psychosexual double entendres. I mean, just look at this picture. LOOK AT IT, for Chrissake. It’s like a scene from that terrible Nicholas Cage Wicker Man remake meets a surreal community college production of The Nutcracker directed by Pat Robertson.
Surely the event itself can’t be that bizarre, can it? Maybe if we listen to the people involved in Purity Balls explain it, they’ll seem just a little bit less demented.
For the Wilsons and the growing number of people who have come to their balls, premarital sex is seen as inevitably destructive, especially to girls, who they say suffer more because they are more emotional than boys. Fathers, they say, play a crucial role in helping them stay pure.
I love the casual misogyny in that part. I mean, girls are always so emotional right, bro? Like, PMSing all over the place constantly. That’s why we’ve got to make sure they stay pure, ’cause otherwise they’ll just cry a lot and be like yap-yap-yap and stuff.
“Something I need from dad is affirmation, being told I’m beautiful,” said Jordyn Wilson, 19, another daughter of Randy and Lisa. “If we don’t get it from home, we will go out to the culture and get it from them.”
…
But surely the people who actually set these things up-
The Abstinence Clearinghouse, an advocacy group, says it sells hundreds of purity ball kits annually to interested groups all over the country and abroad.
The Abstinence Clearinghouse? Seriously, guys? The idea that there’s some kind of big clearinghouse where you can buy … abstinence is too bizarre for words. And talk about the commodification of sex. As Alex said:
Of course, because our fathers are our keepers and protectors, and have a lot invested in our purity because without it we’ll only be worth a dowry of like, 2 sick sheep.
Thank God there’s a clearinghouse where you can exponentially multiply your market value!
My favorite part of the article is near the end, where the Freudian symbolism reaches surreal levels:
In a ballroom after dinner, bare but for a seven-foot wooden cross at one end, the fathers and daughters gathered along the walls. Kevin Moore, there with his three girls, told the men they were taking a stand for their families and their nation. Then he and Mr. Wilson walked to the cross with two large swords, which they held up before it to make an arch.
Each father and his daughter walked under the arch and knelt before the cross. Synthesized hymns played. The fathers sometimes held their daughters and whispered a short prayer, and then the girls each placed a white rose, representing purity, at the foot of the cross. Mr. Lee and Rachel walked away holding hands.
Two giant swords? A cross? White roses? So let me get this straight: Dad walks little Jane under two enormous phallic symbols, carrying a perishable plant that represents her virginity. She then symbolically gives this virginity to Jesus. By placing it in front of the instrument of his torture and murder.
Purity is a fucked-up business, people.
Topics: Religion |
May 20th, 2008 at 1:18 am
hahahaha. some parts of this country are so sexually repressive it makes me throw up in my mouth. this is totally is playing on girls’ fears of religious and male authority, and is just a huge study in retarded.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Pfft. You know, because girls are the only ones who have sex and all. What purity do boys have to lose?
I think the most apparent form of misogyny here is the big price that, not just Christian culture– but almost all cultures– puts on a girl’s virginity. Her worth as a person=her “purity”? C’mon, now. That’s like saying a girl is only as good as her intact hymen, nevermind everything else she has to offer.
Oh wait– that smells like good ol’ patriarchal oppression to me!
May 20th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Hehe.