Like A Virgin

At the farmers market in Paris I went up to the cart of lovely looking pears and as I reached for one, my husband gasped "No, no - don't touch them, here you must only point at the one you want. You aren't supposed to pick them up. It's a faux pas to do that."

"Oh, ok." So I pointed to a glistening pear that looked nice and ripe. The man behind the cart put it in a bag for me and we were on our way. At Luxembourg Gardens we sat to down to eat our freshly bought fare.

I pulled out the lovely green pear, turned it over, and found on the side I couldn't see or touch a nice darkened soft rotten spot.

Fabulous.

In the following article, chastity (somehow the word "purity" is used intermittently with "chastity" - honestly, I can't really make the connection - more on that later) with relation to girls is that pedestal title which is being overseen or managed by their fathers. There are "Purity Balls" which are ceremonies held as a type of father-daughter bonding time where the girls sign a covenant, promising to be chaste before marriage, and wherein the fathers also sign and promise to make sure their daughters remain chaste before marriage.

Hmmm. Control much?

I see this simply as a method to control women within militant religious confines. I think it is kind of sick, really. A pre-teen is obviously not at the age of consent to have sex, BUT also not yet equipped to make the PROMISE not to have sex or even KISS before marriage. I think it is an oppressionist regime that will focus on keeping girls virgins and not mention one iota of a boy's virginity. What of the mother's involvement?

In taking this farce a step further, these girls have been disillusioned into thinking that they should not even kiss a boy before marriage. I take the following quote from this article:

“Once I’ve found a man, I think I might want to get to know him a little better,” she said. “I’ll take him to my dad for inspection and he’ll spend a lot of time with my dad, then maybe I’ll do group-dating with friends and go out to dinner with our parents. If girls don’t have a relationship with their fathers, they’ll turn to other males, and that will often end in heartbreak and anguish.”

What? Take him to your dad for inspection?! My God, what about what YOU THINK? Don't you have minds of your own? The whole father-daughter relationships in these cases is wrought with weird controlling, even pseudo-sexual undertones, for me.

History and nature has taught that it is kind of a teenage daughter's job - to break further away from the parents, to rebel a little and to find her own way. If a girl is to know what she wants, she must test the waters. I think a girl can "shop around" to know what she wants and not go completely crazy. No sex and she's a naive girl with no experience, no information, nothing to compare to and possibly, fear. Too much sex and she's considered a whore. I think there is a relatively safe middle ground here that can achieved.

A woman's sexuality is an important part of a woman's life. To suppress the growth of that sexuality for the sole purpose of entering into an institutional arrangement for the sake of holding title of "the first and only" is not only a dangerous and naive stance to take for the woman because she doesn't know what she is doing and has nothing to compare to, but she is settling. She will settle into a realm of "what if's" and will be sorely disappointed in the end. A controlling man would not want his wife to know what it is like to kiss other men that came before him, because that would empower her with knowledge. With experience. With the ability to compare.

I think sex is but one of many steps on the path up the Relationship Mountain. Sex, in the eyes of these militant folk, IS the mountain. It is an unhealthy view to think that sex is the holy of holies because in their physical want to HAVE sex, these girls will marry the first guy who will wait a little bit for them. Not necessarily the RIGHT guy. They will suppress their biological urges for the sake of men - their fathers, their future husbands - but without the reciprocal rules for the men to follow. Gee, that's rather unfair.

While I don't get the staying-a-virgin-before-marriage thing, I REALLY don't get the not kissing a guy before marriage. A kiss is a beautiful thing that SHOULD be experienced by a teenage girl. It is part of the rite of passage in a girl's life: to remember your first kiss, to recall the humorous moments of a bad kiss, etc.

As a feminist, in this age of disease, of course it is important to be vigilant about who EITHER sex chooses to sleep with. I don't think it is a tool for usury or should be a flippant action devoid of true feelings, however, I think it is a natural act and that not all people are compatible and find out in the course of ...intercourse. Just as I think living together is necessary to find out if the two people in question CAN live with each other. As a precursor to marriage, these things need to be found out. Statistically, the majority of people who have not lived with each other before marriage are doomed to failure.

In this article, the author writes:

I couldn’t help suggesting to one trio of sisters, aged nine, 13 and 17, that they might need to kiss a lot of frogs before they found their handsome prince – but such remarks merely produced frowns. One of them spelt out the word “adultery” silently on her fingers and informed me that it was the core of the seventh commandment.

I think to kiss a few boys before finding one's Prince Charming can hardly be construed as "adultery" in any sense of the word, nor is there evidence that it will lead to adultery in the future. So what will happen if you only pick and point before buying - chances are really good that they will turn out to be rotten fruit.

If I were to have married the first guy I kissed, I guarantee I would be nothing short of miserable. If I were to have married the first guy I slept with, I guarantee I would be nothing short of miserable. Before our engagement, my husband and I agreed that the "asking for permission" is nothing short of calling me a possession owned by my father, so we skipped that little tradition which would have insulted my womanhood. Heck, I kept my last name in partial defiance of being considered a "patriarchal possession". Purity? I think I have a pure heart. I try to be pure of mind and thought. I am pure in my kindness and consideration to others. I am pure in my love for God and am pure in my belief that He loves me back. Virgin or not.

I think the biblical view of women remaining virgins is a cultural and era-driven idea. There are no dowries to be had for a virgin in 2008. The idea of purity should be properly used to describe one's spirituality and how they treat others and the world. A girl can be a virgin who has never kissed...and be the bitchiest, conniving devil the world has seen. So, where's the purity in that?

A virgin army proclaiming the thrill of the chaste: The American ‘purity movement’ is growing fast. Meets the girls who won’t even kiss before marriage and their highly protective fathers

Jane Treays - September 21, 2008 – Times Online - It would be a mistake to draw hasty conclusions from Lauren Wilson’s appearance. This is a woman who tosses her long, glossy hair as she speaks and bats her long eyelashes – even at me. A glamourpuss who admits, with a coy smile, that she is actually a bit of an icon to her peers. But this poised 22-year-old is no small-town seductress. In Colorado Springs, a city in a very religious corner of the American Midwest, she is admired principally for her virtue: not only was she a virgin when she married her boyfriend Brett, but she had never even kissed him – a deed accomplished for the first time in front of a cheering congregation. “There was something so special to know that we’d waited,” she told me. “I mean, a kiss awakens everything, and all of a sudden everything within you just wants to respond. We have no regrets. ” Young women like Lauren are no great rarity in the United States these days. In fact, one in six girls aged between 12 and 18 is estimated to have taken a “purity” pledge. Some wear a silver ring to signal their intention to remain chaste, but others take the concept much further, vowing to be pure in all aspects of their behaviour. Lauren’s sister Khrystian, a 21-year-old musician with long blonde hair, explained: “Purity for me is purity of the mind, purity of speech. It’s what I spend my time doing: emotional purity in the heart. It’s a complete wholeness. I have chosen a higher standard for my life.” The sheer numbers in the purity movement are making these aspirations more than a pipe dream: if the people you know share your deep-seated beliefs, then you’re less likely to succumb to temptations. They even have their own teen idols – such as the Jonas Brothers, the pop band composed of three virginal brothers, who were so rashly mocked by the British comedian Rus-sell Brand at the MTV awards. And there are plenty of ordinary teenage boys and young men who are also prepared to wait. In these circles, those who fall pregnant before marriage can be all but ostracised. One young woman I spoke to – a former beauty queen – got pregnant when she was 19. “The guilt was awful. Mum cried, I cried, my dad started to cry – that’s hard,” said Jessica, her eyes filling with tears eight years after the event. “Ever since then, my mom treats me as a lesser person. She still doesn’t think I’m capable of making my own decisions.” Jessica, who miscarried her baby, now lives “in sin” with a boyfriend; she is 27, but her parents refuse to see him and have told her “he can go to hell”. One can only imagine what the good people of Colorado Springs think of Bristol Palin, the pregnant 17-year-old daughter of John McCain’s running mate – but their sympathy will definitely be with the girl’s parents. Even the purity movement’s rituals – I witnessed one father giving solemn blessings to five daughters in turn – hark back to another age. I’d gone to Colorado Springs in May for Channel 4 to film a group of girls, one of them aged just five, as they prepared for the annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball at the Broad-moor hotel. This ball is considered the apogee of the purity movement. Dressed in elegant gowns, the girls arrived with their dates – their fathers. Then, to the accompaniment of Hollywood film scores, they gathered round a large wooden cross to pledge their troth to remain pure. Taking a leading role was Randy Wilson, the father of Lauren and Khrystian, who believes that the key to a girl’s purity – and future happiness – lies in the quality of her relationship with her dad. As a father of five girls ranging from five to 22, he reckons he knows a thing or two about raising women. “There is a core question that women have in their being, and that is: ‘Am I beauti-ful? Am I worthy of being pursued?’ ” he explained. “It must be enforced by the father, the man in their life. If they do not get that reinforced by the father, they will go outside the home to get the answer to that question.” It was Randy and his wife, Lisa, who came up with the idea of the ball – now in its ninth year and attended by about 130 girls. Mothers are also invited, but often don’t come, and there is usually a smattering of brothers. A three-course dinner, without alcohol, is followed by the signing of a covenant: each dad intones: “I choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.” Typical of the fathers was Ken Lane, a purity devotee who invited me to his white-carpeted home and introduced me to his daughter Hannah, 11. “It sounds unrealistic in our day and age,” he acknowledged. “It’s not the exact path I went down personally – but if it can work, how cool would it be to say that I kissed but one man in my life? Why not shoot for the fairy tale?” Hannah shifted slightly under her father’s gaze when I asked her about dating. “Once I’ve found a man, I think I might want to get to know him a little better,” she said. “I’ll take him to my dad for inspec- tion and he’ll spend a lot of time with my dad, then maybe I’ll do group-dating with friends and go out to dinner with our parents. If girls don’t have a relationship with their fathers, they’ll turn to other males, and that will often end in heartbreak and anguish.” I couldn’t help suggesting to one trio of sisters, aged nine, 13 and 17, that they might need to kiss a lot of frogs before they found their handsome prince – but such remarks merely produced frowns. One of them spelt out the word “adultery” silently on her fingers and informed me that it was the core of the seventh commandment. I asked another girl what she would do if she didn’t like the way her husband kissed her at the altar. She looked thoughtful, then brightened. “I probably would – he’ll probably take care of that one. He’ll probably kiss really good. I hope.” During my 10 days in Colorado Springs, I couldn’t help but register the sweetness of the girls, the complete lack of teenage truculence. There’s no straining at the parental leash, no desire to escape and experiment; they are, in short, a delight. Jane Austen is their cultural heroine, with films such as Sense and Sensibility endorsed as an ideal family-viewing choice. Everywhere I turned, I found sentimentality and scant curiosity about the world. The innocence of the parents was more alarming. An army doctor, who had two daughters on his arm, told me that the HIV virus was so powerful, it could penetrate a con- dom. I said the British government had based its entire antiAids ad campaign on the assumption it couldn’t. A few days later, after doing some research on the internet, he rang to say he’d been wrong. To cynical Brits, the intensity of the relationship between the girls and their fathers can be unsettling. It is too trite, however, to label such relationships quasi-incestuous: these fathers are motivated wholly by a desire to remain a strong, controlling influence in their daughters’ lives. For now, the purity movement is too young for anyone to assess whether it leads to happier marriages or fewer divorces. Courtships tend to be quick. Young men are vet- ted by the fathers, and many suitors seek permission to marry within weeks. They may be madly in love – but they may also be suffering from extreme sexual frustration. Six weeks after the Father-Daugh- ter Purity Ball, Randy e-mailed me to say that Khrystian had just become engaged to a Captain Chad Lewis. She will have her first kiss in December on her wedding day.