Once in awhile, you have a moment where you really see how the Equal Rights Amendment would, contrary to the claims of opponents, have a positive effect on our laws. Lily Ledbetter would have won her case, I suspect, because even the most law-bending reactionary justices would have had trouble denying her claims. Same story with Gonzales v. Carhart, or any abortion restriction really, since they’re all based on the idea that women are second class citizens who can legally have fewer rights than men, and in the case of Carhart, can be treated as mentally inferior as a class to men. I have to wonder if it would make it much easier to challenge abstinence-only education in schools, since the materials invariably come from religious organizations with anti-woman and homophobic agendas.
Maybe not. These groups do try to scrub some of their more offensive beliefs about gays’ and women’s inferiority out of the textbooks, with varying degrees of success. Still, it’s a strange situation, as if our government was accepting history textbooks written by SPLC-recognized hate groups, so long as they make a half-assed effort to cover up their more odious racist assumptions. Because once you get into the thick of the Christianist world, where they’re letting their hair down, their jaw-dropping ideas about women (basically, that they’re property) will shock even the hardened wingnut watchers.
I’m probably the last feminist blogger to link this NY Times story about purity balls, but still it’s worth discussing. Apparently, the organizers of these things realized that by having the girls take the pledges themselves, they were allowing an alarming amount of female autonomy. Once you give a girl the idea that having sex or not is her choice—even if you strongly suggest there’s only one choice that keeps you heaven-bound—you’ve opened the door for her to have all sorts of errant thoughts. Like, “Does this mean my body belongs to me, and is not property to be passed between my father and husband?” To correct that, the organizers eliminated the daughter pledges and reinforced the idea that virginity belongs to fathers and fathers only, and that it’s a gift from them to future sons-in-law.
But after dessert, the 63 men stood and read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”….
The purity pledges for the fathers to sign stood in the middle of the dinner tables. Unlike other purity balls, the daughters here do not make a pledge, said Amanda Robb, a New York-based writer researching a book about the abstinence movement who was at the Broadmoor event.
I’m sort of confused about how this trend towards depriving women of even a hint of autonomy is going to be reflected in the wedding vows. I imagine the only way to handle the whole thing is for men to wheel their daughters up in a cage and set them to the side of the altar while they and their son-in-law make their vows to each other. Duct tape over the bride’s mouth is probably not necessary, but a nice flourish that drives home the point about what Jesus wanted for women.
One thing that’s certain is that this whole system is pretty hard to sustain short of marrying girls off before maturity sets in enough that they start to get rebellious. FLDS figured that one out a long time ago, and from this story, it seems more mainstream fundies are coming around to the idea that the only way to really contain women’s sexuality and teenage sexuality is to embrace early marriage.
Loss tinged many at the ball. Stephen Clark, 64, came to the ball for the first time with Ashley Avery, 17, who is “promised” to his son, Zane, 16. Mr. Clark brought Ashley, in her white satin gown, to show her that he loved her like a daughter, he said, something he felt he needed to underscore after Ashley’s father left her family a year ago.
Of course, we don’t know if the kids did the promising themselves, or if this is closer to an arranged marriage thing, but either way, I’m creeped out. There’s something off about a parent who thinks their kids are too young for sex but plenty old enough to be talking marriage.
Writerdd linked this sad blog post by a woman trying to talk herself into waiting for sex when the wait is torturing her, and I appreciated it for being such a snapshot of how the fundie attitudes about sex are permanently intertwined with sexism. The blogger is angry because all the comfort and advice and understanding about the struggles with lust are aimed at men in her community, and it’s just assumed that women don’t struggle. And she’s here to say that women do in fact struggle. That alone was sad, but then I came across a hint of the attitudes that Christianists have about women’s dirtiness, at least if they’ve had sex:
nd I don’t want that. I want to keep my sexuality safe for my husband (cause I’m sure not called to celibacy) so that when marriage does come along, I can think of him and only him.
She balances that with discussion of how she doesn’t want him to lust after other women (yeah, that attitude’s not going to be a problem when she does get married), but the word “safe” when discussing female virginity really leaped out at me. The fact that the Christianists treat sex as a contamination upon women never fails to interest me. It’s like leprosy by penis, and implies more than a little male self-loathing from the men who think that a woman is permanently ruined by the touch of cock. A woman who has had sex with another man before you is a danger, even if she’s not got any STDs or anything like that. I’m increasingly suspicious that a lot of Christianists think that sticking your godstick into a shame cave that’s been visited by another godstick gets penis vapors all over you and makes you gay.
As an aside, this was a sad moment of delusional thinking that seems to flourish in fundie circles:
It doesn’t help that everybody I know is getting married and telling me that it’s “worth the wait”.
Is it me, or is that a misuse of the phrase? Most of the time, when you describe something as “worth the wait”, you mean that the wait was imposed against your will and if you could have, you would have not waited. Maybe she feels that way about sex, but seriously now, waiting is a choice not an imposition. Using “worth the wait” to describe sex makes a lot more sense if you were waiting against your will, because you couldn’t find a willing partner for a long time. Maybe I’m overthinking this.
But seriously, even if what they mean to say to her is, “Sex is better because we waited,” they have no point of comparison. By telling themselves, based on no evidence at all, that sex is worse if you just do it when you want to and not put an artificial wait time on it, they’re engaging in a little rationalization there. Because one thing that tends to consistently ruin the quality of sex is loading it down with expectations. Even saying, “Tonight, it’s going to be the hottest, more romantic, most perfect sex ever,” is a surefire way to make it last two seconds and end the night with glaring. Imagine building up that level of expectation over months or even years. It’s going to let you down.
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It seems like another incentive for the FLDS to take extremely young brides (besides the ease of early indoctrination) is competition among men for a limited pool of girls, which would tend to encourage earlier and earlier “claiming” of wives. I might be wrong.
This sort of religious universe, the Christianist and/or Dominionist world, definitely practices something that is disturbingly close to arranged marriage. In fact, it’s even more disturbing than arranged marriage, because cultures that go that route in a modern context are no more “passing from father to husband” oriented than modern non-arranged marriages are. Both parties in a 21st century arranged marriage generally have full veto power, and most importantly, the prospective bride and groom have (theoretically) equal levels of agency.
But the “courtship” thing? Ew. The idea is generally that a young man approaches the family of a woman that he finds attractive, and gets to know the parents first. He then starts socializing with the family and zeroing in on the woman in question, except usually not in any romantic capacity. They are not to be alone together, ever, nor are they allowed to show any physical affection (mighty handy for the ex-gays, because you don’t have to perform heterosexuality until you’re actually in your sham marriage, by which point it’s too late because divorce is so heavily frowned upon). When a certain amount of family socializing getting-to-know-you time has passed, the man asks the woman’s father for permission to marry her. If the father says yes, then and only then is the woman approached. And because all this time and ceremony has already been invested, there is serious pressure for her to give in.
It’s just so fucking fucked up, beyond almost anything that the old patriarchal models were ever about in the past. The only thing worse than Christianist “courtship”, in my opinion, is child marriage — which this is perilously close to, anyway, looking at the ages usually involved.
I can’t remember which columnist this was — but a while back, sometime last year or maybe before, I read an advice column in which a man had written in about his wife. They were both Christian and had “saved themselves” for marriage — but his wife was so phobic about sex that after (I think) a year of marriage, she still panicked and cried whenever he tried to initiate sex (like, kissing her, not sticking it in). He was upset and frustrated that he couldn’t make love with his wife, but of course he wasn’t going to force her.
She had been so messed up about sex — had so completely absorbed the messages that losing her virginity would make her dirty, bad, slutty, etc. — that even within a “proper” religious marriage, she couldn’t let go of those messages to enjoy sex with her husband.
I believe the columnist urged them to get therapy — from a Christian therapist if that was what she would agree to.
That story upset me so bad because I could understand just what she meant. I was raised by pretty liberal Catholics, but I still got a good dose of those messages about sex, and it took me years to understand that having sex would not make me “a whore” (with all the attendant stereotypes wrapped up in that word). I can see myself being that woman, if things had been just a little different.
Purity balls always make me think of her.
Yeah, it’s a problem that they have to sell it as a way to make sex better for everyone involved. In the old school patriarchal system like FLDS, they just rape their chlld brides. The notion that she has to like it is tossed out as the obstacle to the system that it is.
She had been so messed up about sex — had so completely absorbed the messages that losing her virginity would make her dirty, bad, slutty, etc. — that even within a “proper” religious marriage, she couldn’t let go of those messages to enjoy sex with her husband.
Well considering that she may well have never even kissed anyone before the wedding day, well, duh. This is another aspect of Christianist courtship that is in a lot of ways more fucked up than patriarchal models of the distant past — sure, you got married off at 17 to some 30 year old you didn’t know, but you weren’t actually expected to go from blushing virgin to knocked up overnight. This whole idea of Teh Wedding Nite is a construct of a different kind of culture, where the couple is expected to already have known each other in at least some sort of romantic context (even the puritans had bundling…). Arranged child-marriage and 21st century ideas about healthy sexuality do not mesh well.
I’d say they mean the sex is better because they waited because now they won’t have post-sex guilt.
Eh, my friend got married not long ago and his family think he and his bride waited. I don’t know for certain but I DO know that at least until 4 years ago, he HAD waited.
Last year, my GF’s sister got married to her childhood sweetheart and I know for a fact that they both waited as without going into details my GF said the questions she got asked for advice were pretty blunt.
I’m honestly not sure what that brings to the conversation only that in the situation of male friend, and my GF’s sister and her intended, those choices were voluntary.
Right on the money. I used to bring this up with my evangelical friends in high school whenever we got the abstinence only crap. I’d point out to them that it’s not sex that makes women dirty but men who make women dirty and what does that say about men? What I’d get is blank expressions or they’d just walk away from me, like most of the reactions I’d get whenever I’d point out flaws in their systems. What would usually happen is they’d go home and talk to their pastors/parents and come at me the next day with some kind of “explanation” (in this case, marriage is from God and because God says it’s okay then, God has cleaned the penis/sex of all it’s dirtiness. I’m sure he used Pledge, or some kind of divine bleach) But I would just continue to poke holes. Drove them crazy and most of them just stopped brining up any kind of religious discussion with me by Senior year.
Yes, the rest of us already blogged about the “purity balls” (which, it must be said, sound like a special kind of testicles).
One of the people who commented on my post on the topic pointed out the marginalization of mothers here—it’s fathers who are charge of daughters’ virginity, with the mothers sitting home. Sons, of course, need not have their virginity protected, because they’re male.
The creepiest undertone to “purity balls” is the father-to-husband delivery of a young woman’s chastity. It seems like a sex club for men in which older men ensure the availability of a “tight piece of ass” for younger men, doesn’t it?
There’s also the fostering of the patriarchy’s continuation—it’s not enough for a man to have a submissive wife, he also wants to hand over a submissive daughter to be another man’s underling. Why strive to have your daughter enter into a marriage of equals someday? She’s just a girl and doesn’t deserve full personhood.
I’m surprised the writer just let that part about the pledges being made by the fathers, rather than the usual practice of having the daughters take the pledge, stand without any additional probing.
I’m honestly not sure what that brings to the conversation only that in the situation of male friend, and my GF’s sister and her intended, those choices were voluntary.
I think the key word here is voluntary. Everything I’ve read about purity balls pretty much dispels the notion that these young girls are making voluntary choices. I read in one of these articles (could have been this one) that girls as young as 5 and 6 were vowing to let daddy protect their highly prized virginity. Yeah, I’ll bet that was voluntary.
Every time I read a purity ball article, I e-mail it to my 72-year old dad. He is just completely grossed out and not just a little bit outraged. And creeped out. As he said, “Fathers have a special capacity to do tremendous damage to their daughters. These nuts are screwing their girls up for a lifetime.”
My sister and I thank FSM on a regular basis we’ve always had a (generally) level-headed dad who took huge delight and pride in his daughters, even after our “virtue” was long and happily gone.
These men don’t deserve the privilege of having daughters.
Wow, that goes beyond even eighteenth century theories of marriage, in which the bride freely entered into a contract, the marriage contract, which prevented her from ever making a contract again. In the scenario at this purity ball, the girls don’t even get to freely sign away their personhood through marriage, their fathers sign it away for them.
Oh, and what Tyro just said.
Something deeply psychologically disturbing about a grown man taking so much interest in a little girl’s sexuality.
Some years ago Amanda did a post on “virginity fetish” (in the title) which resulted in a very long discussion thread. Both the post and the thread were excellent, but seem to have disappeared into the swamps of the internetz. Amanda, any chance of it being put into the archives and linked to this thread?
Judging from the Times’ general lack of awareness of subcultural movements and trends outside the scope of the upper middle class Ivy league educated Manhattanite investment banker, I’d guess that the writer didn’t know that the fathers making the pledge was not the norm.
To me this article looks like yet another of their “5 years too late” social trend pieces. The minute you hear about any new cultural meme from the Times, you know that its heyday has probably come and gone. They are inevitably slow on the uptake and lacking in even an attempt to understand or contextualize the cultural issues they cover. It’s kind of astounding, actually. These days when I see something in the Style/Living section, I know it’s already passe.
I’m a little surprised that the daughters are no longer required to promise chastity, but I wonder if the reason isn’t due to the fact that so many young women were unable to fulfil their vows, after all, and had such horrific guilty consciences about it and/OR (more likely, IMO), those vows led to a startling rise in oral sex and, IIRC, even anal sex. Maybe it was those unintended consequences, one of which was still sex, that led them to rethink it and in the process realize they could also strengthen father’s “authority” over daughters/women in general.
I am totally creeped out by these purity balls and have been all along. It strikes me as more than a little incestuous for fathers to be that interested in their daughters’ virginity — so interested that they give the daughters a ring (are they still doing that)? So interested that the girl gets all dolled up and they go dancing together? So interested that either of them are supposed to promise anything to the other about her virginity)? So interested that the dads — the half of each couple that knows all about sex — are thinking about their daughters and sex and a LOT because they’re involved in planning on attending this purity ball? And perhaps talking about it with other dads? All I can say is: Ewwwww.
Hope ya’ll will visit my new blog: http://msandrist.wordpress.com/
In other news, Chris Muir still can’t fins TEH FUNNY with a map.
I’m sure you’re all shocked to hear this.
He can’t finD it, either *grumble*
The fathers will COVER their daughters?!?!?!?!
Okay, tell me I’m not the only one who knows that’s a euphemism for sex. This group… it’s been said before it’s kind of creepy taking so much interest in their daughters sexuality. But that vow can be construed as a promise to incest-rape their daughters. and I’m creeped out by a suspicion that wasn’t just bad wording. Maybe not all of them, but I’d be willing to bet $100 bucks that 20 years from now, one or more of those girls comes forth as an abuse victim.
I think the key word here is voluntary. Everything I’ve read about purity balls pretty much dispels the notion that these young girls are making voluntary choices.
I can’t resist being a pissant, but just because something is a legally made “free choice” doesn’t mean that it’s above criticism or analysis. People who voluntarily engage in misogynist practices, even women, still get criticized by me. Christians who wait for marriage can say, “It’s a free choice!” and I’ll defend their right to make it, but reserve the right to think it’s a stupid idea grounded in misogyny.
Yeah, Samantha, that “cover” usage seems to be in those pledges for the fathers as a rule, and every time it’s mentioned on a blog that I’ve seen, someone points out its animal husbandry connections. I still don’t know what exactly to think about that word choice, over, say, “protect” or the like.
It’s a sad thing when the female characters in the Little House on the Prairie books have more agency, free choice, and independence than the girls described in that article in 2008.
Laura Ingalls told Almanzo Wilder that she wouldn’t promise to obey him, because she couldn’t promise to obey anyone against her better judgement. (from Those Happy Golden Years)
I don’t know what to make of the girls not making vows anymore.
It was pretty disturbing that they were forcing their daughters into these vows to give up their agency over their sexuality, many times before puberty. I think I might be just as squicked out now that they aren’t even asking their daughters, but just vowing on their own.
Their promising to protect their chattel.
It’s just so yucky all around.
I’m just going to close4 my eyes and dream of an Obama presidency where day one he executive orders the end of the gag rule and suspension of ALL faith-based initiatives. And fires EVERYONE in all gov’t offices and hires people with credentials from real schools and experience in their fields.
Hell, I’d take a bit of political weasling and corruption if I could just get that level of competency out of my gov’t again.
Honestly, that’s actually a pretty good reason.My sister in law also waited for her marriage. She converted from Hinduism to extreme Christianity in college and is now raising her kids in that tradition. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see my 8 year old niece at a purity ball at some point in the future if it were left up to her, except that the brother in law, while also an extreme Christian, isn’t completely creepy.
I know they waited because when I was dating my husband and she was engaged to hers, I got taken to Toronto for Christmas to meet the family. She saw me taking my birth control pill and asked me all sorts of interesting, disapproving, and, I thought, inappropriate questions concerning my and her brother’s sex life. Because she had no clue. She also seemed kind of upset that I wasn’t at all apologetic about it. The real kicker there, though, was that I was 21 at the time, she was 29, and we had only just met a few weeks before. I thought that surely there was someone better to ask those things of than me, but apparently not.
Which was one of the comedic themes in that Rodney Dangerfield movie Easy Money. They didn’t pull it out of thin air.
And no, Samantha, you’re not the only one who gets creeped out every time you hear that word.
hello,
I am the person who wrote the blog about my sexuality and whom writerdd discussed. You guys seem to feel sorry for me and you really don’t need to be. You may say this is denial but that’s your opinion I guess. This is something I am working on but it’s not that big of a deal. I do have a life. I recognize my sexuality and I believe it comes from God. I just want to use it in the right way.
Unfortnately, in an attempt to reign in the amount of sexuality being promoted in society, the Church has often gone in a completely extreme opposite direction and say that sexuality is bad. I never said (at least I never meant to say) that sexuality or sex is “bad” and I think you misunderstood me when I said I would keep my sexuality “safe”. By no means do I think sex itself is dirty, wrong, or whatever. I mean for crying out loud, they have an entire book in the bible (Song of Solomon) that talks about the beauty of sex in the best situation. a man and a woman. it’s kinda blunt actually.
Do I expect my first night with my husband to be the best sex ever? No. It will probably be awkward and without being too crude, it will hurt. But I love idea that this awkwardness and that my body will be only see by a guy who has pledged his life to me. Not just an “I love you” but a concrete commitment. I don’t want to give myself up to just any one. And if he has had sex before ? So what. It’s his past and we move on.
When I said “It doesn’t help that everybody I know is getting married and telling me that it’s “worth the wait”.” I mean that there is a struggle between what I want physically and what I want emotionally/spiritually. Physically, I’m like “let’s get it on” but emotionally/spiritually I choose to hold off. I hope this makes more sense.
Even though there is still a problem over churches not mentioning female sexuality, I notice people are standing up. Books are coming out. Churches all over are recognizing this. I know you may find this difficult to believe, but the Church is actually changing. It’s just no one puts that in the media.
The way these people talk about their daughters remind me of nothing less than the Taliban and other islamic fundies. It’s damned sick and twisted. And these islamic fundies are the ones the christian fundies think we should be killing in mass numbers. I guess it’s good the christian fundies are so willfully ignorant… otherwise we’d have an epidemic of heads exploding.
The fathers will COVER their daughters?!?!?!?!
Okay, tell me I’m not the only one who knows that’s a euphemism for sex
You want to know what’s even creepier about the use of that word?
Let’s go back in time, to maybe the early 19th century (I’m pretty sure this concept started to become an anachronism shortly thereafter), to a little legal concept called “couverture”. Derived, of course, from the french word for “cover”.
Couverture was the term for the legal concept that a woman was not, in the eyes of civil law, a full human being (because she was “covered” by her father or husband). She could not enter into contracts, own property, inherit anything, speak in court, bring a lawsuit, hold public office, or otherwise participate in the public sphere. Couverture was the reason the women in Jane Austen novels are always in a tizzy — they were at the mercy of their male next of kin, and if that wasn’t their (goodhearted) father or an honest and upright husband (or, I guess, a son, having been raised up right by said honest and upright husband), god only knew what would become of them.
The idea that it’s used in the context of the purity ball is creepy enough in terms of the language of sexuality, but it’s fucking dangerous in terms of the language of women’s legal agency. These men are basically assuming the (extra)legal right to control their daughters until such time as they are married off (of course including final say in their husbands). An idea that died out in the USA before the Civil War.
Anytime you have a 64-year-old man bringing a 17-year-old girl somewhere in a fancy dress that rings alarm bells for me. I also kinda wonder about the age of whoever he had the 16-year-old son with.
The tradition marriage ceremony pretty much writes the bride out anyway — she can get away with an “I do” and “I will”, with everything else spoken by others…
I’m afraid I take a darker view of this (of course) which is: it’s not that (according to Fundie cosmology) a woman is made “dirty” by a man or even that a man is made “dirty” by a woman (though I believe the second alternative comes closer than the first to describing the true Fundie view of the business) but that a man is made “dirty” by the prospect of sharing a (presumably straight) woman who’s had more than one sexual partner with another man—–or with other men. IOW, that’s the point at which the hoary spectre of gayness raises its neatly-barbered head.
That the spectre of male homosexuality is the favorite incubus of Fundies is something it’s impossible not to notice. And in fact it’s not surprising that Fundies should be haunted in this specific fashion, because homosociality is such an important part of their worldview that it always threatens to morph into outright homoeroticism and from thence into homosexuality. (Yes, I know, stuff doesn’t work like that; what I’m saying is that I’m not surprised that Fundies appear to think it does.)
If you’re part of a social movement which subscribes to the belief that society exists primarily for the benefit of men, and exists primarily as a result of the efforts of men, then it will stand to reason (for you) that the most important relationships within society, the relationships which do most of the work of riveting society together, are relationships between men, to which the dealings of men with women as well as the dealings of women with other women will naturally have to take second place. Once you’ve posited the primacy of male-to-male interactions you’re going to have a hard time drawing a fast-and-distinct line as to where that primacy should stop. At what point, and in what way, should a man’s wife be more important to him than his buddy is?
Here’s why it doesn’t startle me that Fundies at times experience such difficulty answering that question: if man is created in the image of God, and if woman is created to worship the image of God, isn’t a man’s buddy by definition more worthy of his affection than his wife could ever be? Factor into this equation the circumstance that American Fundamentalism sports some of the characteristics of a fertility cult—–that it sets great store by reproduction and consequently regards same-sex predilections with a jaundiced eye—–and you’ve got a table set, as it were, for all sorts of peculiar male behavior. This purity-ball stuff fails to astound me; if anything, I’m surprised that the behavior of these people isn’t weirder than it is.
Purity balls are one of the rituals Fundies have devised both to contain and express the emotional consequences of their profound commitment to (male) homosociality. Of course the notion of a father’s “covering” his daughter with his authority so that she’ll remain a virgin until marriage sounds sexual. That’s because it is sexual. At the same time, only a churl would suggest that something like this is supposed to invoke actual incest (it’s not). What it’s supposed to invoke instead is the relationship between the father-in-law-to-be and his daughter’s future husband.
It’s essential, in terms of the Fundie mindset, that that relationship—–which is, by Fundie reckoning, the relationship that counts most in any marriage arrangement—–remain unstained by any implication with gayness. The guarantor of that unstainedness turns out to be, oddly enough, the prospective bride: if she’s a virgin and only if she’s a virgin, the hairier possibilities of two men’s having “shared” the same woman disappear. Certain implications fail to arise. The men can go on trading secret handshakes and exchanging esoteric Fundie lodge-brother passwords in good conscience; if Fundie women are virgin at marriage and faithful thereafter, obviously Fundie men can’t be using their women as conduits to get to each other. It’s true that they’re still using their women as conduits for money and property, but then everybody does that.
Amen.
Kristina-
I do feel sorry for you in this regard, because I was you a few years ago. I was busy trying to stay abstinent, because I thought it was “what god wanted” or because it would ruin my life. But I have to tell you, that I regret not engaging in (willing, consensual, respectful, protected) sex when I was a high schooler. Then I would have had longer to enjoy something that is a fantastic part of human life, and had more time to get over internalized “dirtiness”.
At the very least, masturbation is, not a perfect substitue, but a pretty good one to get some nice feelings (with the added benefit, of when you do decided to have sex, you’ll know what you like and how to get it).
The fathers will COVER their daughters?!?!?!?!
Okay, tell me I’m not the only one who knows that’s a euphemism for sex
Sooooo… when, in all those war movies, the gruff sergeant barks “Cover me!” to his troops, it actually means…
Gah. Let’s not even go there.
Three bits of data:
1) My (much) older sister, who says she’s only slept with her husband, and only after they were married. Unlike a lot of my friends who did or attempted to do the same thing, she’s managed to have a very healthy sexuality and very enthusiastic relationship with her husband. I don’t quite know how that works. She’s also older enough than me that she wasn’t raised in this “zomg abstinence only!” culture, so it was likely a choice.
2) The son of a friend who I remember took a purity pledge in front of our small church, and was given a necklace/chain to wear (instead of a purity ring). So boys do do it, but more as an extension of the thing girls do, by people who are really serious about it, I think. He was about 16, 17 at the time and I have no idea if he kept the pledge.
3) My 13 year old female cousin, whom I ran into last week wearing a very pretty ring. “Oh-ho,” I said, teasing, “you’ve gotten engaged, have you?” “It’s a purity ring,” said she, and I felt slightly sick. She’s thirteen! She’s being told sex is dirty and bad before she even knows what it IS! Ayargh! I know how messed up similar messages made me, and I had less pressure applied than that. Ended up ranting about it a bit to my 12-year-old sister, who looked bemused and who probably thinks she’s going to wait herself. Given the experiences of her older siblings, though, I have my doubts….
Thanks for sharing Krista, but I have to call attention to this because it’s a sentiment shared by a lot of fundamentlist women and it only fuels into the idea that there is a Madonna/Whore complex. Men can have as much sex as they want outside of marriage, it’s almost expected of them as long as it’s with a “slut” or some other kind of low woman, but if a woman does it then she’s trespassed against the patriarchy and she’s now dirty goods unfit for marriage.
If it’s okay for your future husband to have sex outside of marriage, and other women who he did not pledge his life to have seen him naked and experienced him and you will just chalk that up to his past but why is it not okay for you? Why aren’t you allowing yourself to have those experiences (aside from the obvious religious beliefs).
You are giving him something you believe is special but aren’t even expecting/apparently don’t care that he might not give that to you in return which I would say is disingenuous to yourself at best, though you probably don’t see it that way. If you believe that god is expecting sexual purity of you, why wouldn’t god expect purity from your future husband? Why don’t you make that an expectation?
It’s a kind of mental slavery that keeps women in check because they’re policing themselves at this point while men don’t even have to be bothered with this for the most part, because they’re given the “boys will be boys” and “men can’t help themselves” outs. You don’t care that he might not be a virgin but if you lost your virginity before marriage you’d probably freak out and feel badly and at that point the patriarchy has done it’s job.
Kristina, I’m agreeing with Antigone here, as someone else who tried abstinence for a long time. If you do chose to have sex when you’re not married, it doesn’t have to mean you’re sleeping with “just anyone.” You can be extremely choosy–I think everyone here would agree that’s probably a good idea. You can chose to only sleep with someone you are very attracted to; someone who you like as a person outside the bedroom; whom you respect, and who respects you. Some even decide not to have sex unless they’re in a relationship that looks like it’s going to be long-term. The choice is not between no sex at all and unfettered promiscuity. The point is that if you know yourself and what you want, both emotionally and sexually, you can figure out for yourself what lines you want to draw and what you’re okay with and not okay with in your sex life. Assuming that you shouldn’t have sex unless you’re married might be selling yourself short.
private and public realms
“It seems like another incentive for the FLDS to take extremely young brides (besides the ease of early indoctrination) is competition among men for a limited pool of girls, which would tend to encourage earlier and earlier “claiming” of wives. I might be wrong.”
I think you’re right. If the FLDS were monogamous, other men in the society would cease to be rivals in finding a wife. By since the FLDS was polygamous, every man remains a rival, and this probably did drive FLDS members to stake their claim on future wives and younger and younger ages.
Kristina, the vast vast majority of people I’ve talked to who value waiting (but didn’t themselves), plan to wait, or did wait, honestly believe that their first sex will be the best sex ever known to man.
Of course, it never ever is. THe one person who DID claim this also went immediately into TTC, and anyone experienced with that will learn pretty quickly how un-sexy it makes sex become.
Kristina, I’m not pitying you because I assume anything. I’m basing all my “assumptions” on facts you stated in your actual blog post.
What’s TTC, Ashley?
“Trying To Conceive”??
Toronto Transit Commission, which makes sense. The Yonge 97 bus is definitely a place where things become un-sexy pretty quickly.
Uff da. I was raised in a mainstream, Lutheran church, and even I got inculcated with the idea that sex was only something that bad girls and whores did. It made my first time hell. Not because the sex was bad, but because I burst into tears afterwards because I was bad girl and a whore for having sex. It took my patient partner years to help me get over the hang-ups from my religious upbringing.
I can’t even imagine the kind of guilt and shame that these girls, brought up in Fundie households, will feel upon having sex, frankly even after marriage. All those messages that “sex is bad, sex is dirty” don’t just disappear because you have a ring on your finger and are marrying the nice boy that Daddy picked out for you.
Waiting can be a choice, and for some people, a good choice. Waiting because you believe that sex makes you a slutty whore (but magically does nothing to your future spouse) is not a sign of a healthy view of sexuality.
Umm, Christina, do you have any idea how often people have believed that over the past two thousand years or so? And do you have any idea how many of them were flung out of their faith communities if they were lucky and ended up sniffing woodsmoke or tasting their own blood in cellars if they weren’t?You sing an old, hopeful song. It will be drowned out by the bitterness, the hatefulness, the misogyny and the power madness of the established abrahamic religious orders; it always is. And yet, somehow, God never comes to rescue people like you, which kind of leaves you with two reasons for this persistent failure of the Deity to protect the good and the decent and the thoughtful over the bullies and haters and narrow-minded, bigoted zealots: (1) He’s not there. (2) He is there, but isn’t on your side.
Two things:
What Nenya said.
Apologies to Kristina for the misspellig.
You know what? I don’t think it’s a terribly brilliant thing for all of us to chime in to Kristina that she needs to be going out and having sex in high school.
Not because I’m pro-abstinence and think pre-marital sex is wrong.
Mainly because I think the decision to have sex needs to rest in the individual. Kristina should have sex when she is ready. Of course, I wish and hope that Kristina will develop a metric of readiness that revolves around loving herself and seeing sex as a beautiful thing, rather than a rule-bound Jeebuss Sez We Hab 2 Wate Fore Merrij sort of idea.
I lost my virginity at 14. It was probably not a great thing to do. Luckily I was able to see that it was not a good thing because I wasn’t ready, not because I thought sex was dirty. After that I waited till my freshman year of college, because
I am a clicheI realized that I was ready for all the responsibilities that come with being sexually active.I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not having sex in high school. In fact I don’t think most young teenagers are in any way ready to be having sex. I just think that any discouragement should be framed around the idea of responsibility and choosing to have sex because you really want to, not out of social (or sexual!) pressure. Rather than “you will be a dirty slut if you don’t save the precious flower of your virginity for your future husband”.
patriarchy
patriarchal
the patriarchy
Arrgh. My eyes are bleeding.
We are not talking about patriarchy, but *theocracy*. Someone wrote above that this purity crap exists to benefit men. No it doesn’t! Filling boys’ heads with twisted notions about life and love doesn’t do them any good.
Umm, Christina, do you have any idea how often people have believed that over the past two thousand years or so?
Haha, no doubt. “The church is changing” huh? How is re-adopting a Jane Austen-era practice a progression?
It took my patient partner years to help me get over the hang-ups from my religious upbringing.
It can’t be emphasized enough: fundamentalist practices don’t exist to help men, but to serve god. And that doesn’t do any human beings any good.
We are not talking about patriarchy, but *theocracy*.
You can’t talk about theocracy without patriarchy, they are inherently linked.
Someone wrote above that this purity crap exists to benefit men. No it doesn’t! Filling boys’ heads with twisted notions about life and love doesn’t do them any good.
The patriarchy hurts boys/men, too. Color me shocked.
We are not talking about patriarchy, but *theocracy*.
You can’t talk about theocracy without patriarchy, they are inherently linked.
Someone wrote above that this purity crap exists to benefit men. No it doesn’t! Filling boys’ heads with twisted notions about life and love doesn’t do them any good.
The patriarchy hurts boys/men, too. Color me shocked.
We are not talking about patriarchy, but *theocracy*.
I don’t want to quibble, but yes, in this particular post we are definitely talking about patriarchal social constructs.
“Patriarchy” doesn’t necessarily mean “a society where Teh Doods always win”. In strictly formalist terms, it means a society organized so that males dominate the public sphere and women are not considered full human beings.
The idea that a woman is owned by her father until he chooses to marry her off, whereupon she is owned by her husband, is just about the most patriarchal idea ever thought up. Not in the way that feminists tend to overuse the term to mean “favoring men”, but in the classic anthropological/sociological sense of the term.
Yes, here this is all justified by belief in God, and of course the groups that practice this are also in favor of establishing an American theocracy. But the main reason the fundies want to set up this particular model of society is that this is the sort of patriarchy set forth in the Bible (mainly, to be perfectly honest, because it was the way of the world back then, not really because God Says Teh Menz R Better; the fundies’ beloved Old Testament includes a great many stories of strong women who acted outside their domestic roles and are rewarded for it).
I would agree, with the caveat that it is incomplete. I’m more in agreement with my edited version:“Patriarchy” … means a society organized so that males dominate the public and private spheres; where women are not considered full human beings; where almost every benefit of the society flows not to males per se but to societal alpha males. Almost all laws and rules and administration and theology and theocracy in the society are designed to protect, perpetuate and reinforce this dynamic.
This is where the opoponax’s comment about Teh Doods is startlingly accurate, because one of the biggest rules for the vast majority of men who aren’t in the alpha category is this: “cross us or try and get even a tinier fair shake from us and we will take away the few benefits and powers that you do have (usu. over women and children) and make you as reviled and powerless as they are”. That,naturally, is the subtext of much of the “they are SO like girls!” stuff flung at Democrats officially by the GOP and unofficially by their servants like Maureen Dowd.
Just to follow that last post, a belated thought: the perfect example is the FLDS: Males get the main benefits, but, with the exception of the males at the absolute apex, each male gets the benefits solely on the sufferance of the very few men who run the place. Cross them and you can be cast out and your women (like any other slave) transferred to the ownership of another. Be a threat to them, even by the mere fact of your existence, and you can be destroyed. Look at the young men cast out of the FLDS groups: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jun/14/usa.julianborger.
In this respect, patriarchal structures are like any other form of right-wing ideology, whether corporate, capitalist or fascistic: its survival rests on the very thin yet surprisingly resilient reed of convincing the majority to act against their own interests, either in the hope of gaining power and place (when it is, in fact, permanently shut off to almost all of them), or, threatening to take away what tiny portion power and place they do have.
The key to authoritarian power structures is that half a loaf is better than none and most people know it. That’s why authoritarian power structures, by offering some power to those in the middling levels, can get them to accept it instead of fighting for a larger piece and risking getting nothing. Even those at the mostly bottom (women in a patriarchy, poor people in a wealth-hierarchy, etc) can be induced to feel they have power by designating an out-group which they can feel superior to. This is key to racism; In the Confederate South, even dirt-poor whites could still feel superior to blacks, creating a sense of white unity.
In something like the FLDS, even the women at the bottom can still feel superior to the sinners outside it. They have the assurance of Heaven, so long as they don’t rebel.
Successful authoritarian systems need incentives for those at the nearly bottom, as they’re usually too numerous for force to work on them on a grand scale.
Leaving the main topic to jump back to something in the OP:
I don’t think any constitutional amendment, especially not one with broad fuzzy language is going, by itself, to work to ensure the protection of women’s rights if judges are appointed who want to subvert it. The history of the Supreme Court is a long history of the Supreme Court twisting laws and the Constitution into origami to justify ridiculous things. Such cases as Plessy vs. Ferguson, United States vs. EC Knight, Dredd Scott, Fletcher v. Peck, etc. demonstrate that you can easily twist and bend the constitution into knots.
What the ERA will do whenever it does finally get ratified is that it will provide a further justification for liberal judges to protect women’s rights and attack discrimination. But it can’t protect women’s rights just by existing any more than the 14th amendment was able to prevent Plessy vs. Ferguson and decades of discrimination. (Which is to say, I’d like to see it ratified, but I don’t expect it to be supremely effective all by itself, independent of who is on the judiciary.)
hello,
I am the person who wrote the blog about my sexuality and whom writerdd discussed. You guys seem to feel sorry for me and you really don’t need to be. You may say this is denial but that’s your opinion I guess. This is something I am working on but it’s not that big of a deal. I do have a life. I recognize and accept my sexuality and I believe it comes from God. I just want to use it in what I believe is the best way.
Unfortunately, in an attempt to reign in the amount of sexuality being promoted in society, the Church has often gone in a completely extreme
opposite direction and say that sexuality is bad. I never said (at least I never meant to say) that sexuality or sex is “bad” and I think you misunderstood me when I said I would keep my sexuality “safe”. By no means do I think sex itself is dirty, wrong, or whatever. I mean for crying out
loud, they have an entire book in the bible (Song of Solomon) that talks about the beauty of sex in the best situation. a man and a woman. it’s kinda
blunt actually.
Do I expect my first night with my husband to be the best sex ever? No. It will probably be awkward and without being too crude, it will hurt. But I
love idea that this awkwardness and that my body will be only see by a guy who has pledged his life to me. Not just an “I love you” but a concrete commitment. I don’t want to give myself up to just any one. And if he has had sex before ? So what. It’s his past and we move on.
When I said “It doesn’t help that everybody I know is getting married and telling me that it’s “worth the wait”.” I mean that there is a struggle
between what I want physically and what I want emotionally/spiritually. Physically, I’m like “let’s get it on” but emotionally/spiritually I choose
to hold off. I hope this makes more sense.
Even though there is still a problem over churches not mentioning female sexuality, I notice people are standing up. Books are coming out. Churches
all over are recognizing this. I know you may find this difficult to believe, but the Church is actually changing. It’s just no one puts that in the media as much
A side issue, I know, but what rhymes with “lust”? Trust? Must? Dust? Cussed? Fussed? Bust?
For some reason the only ideas I had were “crust” and “trussed”. I think I was just hungry, though.
Kristina,
I think it is perfectly fine (and commendable) for you not to have sex until you are ready for it. And if marriage is what it takes for you, more power to you. But, like others, I am a little troubled by this:
“Do I expect my first night with my husband to be the best sex ever? No. It will probably be awkward and without being too crude, it will hurt. But I love idea that this awkwardness and that my body will be only see by a guy who has pledged his life to me. Not just an “I love you” but a concrete commitment. I don’t want to give myself up to just any one. And if he has had sex before ? So what. It’s his past and we move on.”
Do you think it might be a bit different if it was both of your first times instead of just yours? It just seems like you are elevating your own virginity to such a high status, and yet being totally blase about his. Why wouldn’t you want to be with someone who held himself to the same standard you did? Particularly if it is important to you?
well Ismene I would like it if my husband is a virgin but I don’t want to hold it against him. In a way, I want to hold myself to that standard because of my current relationship with God but if he has already had sex before he decides to become a Christian or during a certain point in his walk, I don’t want to be like “oh wow what a loser” or whatever.