EARLIER THAT DAY, I had stopped by the country club to chat with some of the previous ball attendees, who return each year to help with the festivities. Several of them wore sweatshirts bearing the initials S.W.A.T., for “Sisters Walking Accountable Together,” a club formed to support girls in vows of chastity. I had changed my own shirt three times before heading out the door. A loose-fitting scoop-necked sweater over a tank top suddenly seemed too revealing, especially since the sweater tended to slide around and show a bra strap. A cardigan over the same tank also seemed potentially immodest. I settled on a boat neck pullover, hoping it wouldn’t be seen as too tight. These are not, I hasten to say, my typical thoughts as I dress in the morning, but somehow the Purity Ball’s emphasis on “modesty” and “purity” made me feel more conscious of how my body and self-presentation might be judged by others than I had been since I was a teen.
In the daylight, the ballroom was relentlessly beige, its view a winter-drab golf course under a sodden sky. Several girls were tying pink tulle bows to chairs. Haylee, a high school senior, dressed in sweatpants and a S.W.A.T. sweatshirt, stood back to survey the effect, hands on her hips, brow furrowed. “I think it might be a little too ‘Sweet Sixteen,’” she said.
“But that’s how old the girls are!” another girl countered.
Haylee was, in many ways, like any of the girls I met: she was bright and articulate, excelled in school, was athletic. (She’d played soccer competitively since she was five years old and taught windsurfing in the summer.) She even attended what she called a “hipster, do what you want” liberal arts magnet school. On a chilly Saturday, she had wound her hair into a messy bun, and the red polish on her short nails was chipped. I asked if there were many other pledgers among her classmates. She snorted with laughter. “No,” she said. “Actually it’s very easy to be anything at my high school except for a Christian. People are very accepting of whatever gender you think you want to be. That’s cool. And you can be whatever sexuality you want to be, too, except for pure. It’s strange that way. Most people, when I talk about the Purity Ball are like, ‘You are so judgmental.’ And I say, ‘You’re being judgmental about me!’” As a result, she said, she has few friends at school, mostly hanging around a small group of like-minded athletes. For her, she said, the ball, which she first attended four years earlier, at age thirteen, had been a revelation. “I’d never really felt special the way the ball made me feel,” she explained. “I didn’t know I could love and be loved the way I can and do now.”
Haylee had never had a boyfriend. “My school is two-thirds girls, and most of the guys are gay,” she said cheerfully. If she did, though, she thinks she would draw the line at hand-holding. Possibly a kiss, but nothing more. “I think it would be really cool not to have your first kiss until your wedding day,” she said. Other girls around us agreed. One said she would never be alone in a room with a boy, not even a dark movie theater—“Maybe a two-person table at a restaurant,” she allowed. Another girl limited hugs with her boyfriend to three seconds so, she said, “things wouldn’t get stirred up.”
Haylee and her friends seemed utterly sincere, totally confident in their convictions. If they remain so, though, they will be in the minority. According to Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas, nearly three-quarters of white evangelical teens disapprove of premarital sex, as opposed to half of mainline Protestants and a quarter of Jews. (Evangelical virgins, incidentally, are also the least likely to imagine that sex will feel good; Jews are most likely to cite pleasure as a reason to indulge.) Despite that, evangelicals are the most sexually active of those groups. They lose their virginity younger, at an average age of sixteen, and are less likely to protect against pregnancy or disease, perhaps due to a lack of education, or perhaps because preparing for intercourse would make their fall from grace appear premeditated.
Abstinence vows do have some impact, particularly among younger teens: according to sociologists Peter Bearman of Columbia University and Hannah Brückner of Yale, fifteen- and sixteen-year-old pledgers delay intercourse about eighteen months beyond their peers (though that’s decidedly not “until marriage”) and have fewer sexual partners. But the effect vanishes if more than 30 percent of those in a given community want in. Pledging has to feel special, like membership in an exclusive club. Hence, I suppose, the lure of abstinence swag: the rings, T-shirts, notebooks, wristbands, gimme caps, and other gewgaws that declare, “Don’t Drink and Park,” or “Keep Calm and Stay Pure,” or simply, “True Love Waits.”
So maybe it does, but not indefinitely and not for everything. Male pledgers are four times more likely to have anal sex than other young people, and pledgers of both sexes are six times more likely to engage in oral sex. What’s more, by age eighteen, their resolve begins to crack; by their twenties, over 80 percent of pledgers either deny or have forgotten that they ever pledged at all. The only lesson that sticks is that they remain less likely to use contraception and drastically less likely to protect against disease. Having heard Pam Stenzel warn repeatedly that condoms are useless against infections and that taking birth control pills will leave a girl “sterile or dead,” I guess I’m not surprised. Still, it’s interesting that young adults retain the unsafe-sex messages of abstinence education even as they jettison the rest. The upshot is that pledgers have the same rates of STDs and pregnancy as the general population, even though they begin intercourse later and report fewer sexual partners overall. Nor is marriage fully protective: female pledgers married younger than other women, but even those who had never previously had intercourse (about 12 percent) tested positive for STDs at the same rates as married nonpledgers.
Folks such as Wilson and Stenzel like to say that waiting for your one true partner will make sex not only holier but hotter. The chemicals your brain releases during sex, they explain, will bond you to that one person, training you, Pavlov-style, to feel aroused and sensual whenever you are together. It’s a romantic notion, but, again, it does not appear to be true. A 2014 study of young evangelical Christian men offered a more objective glimpse into the post-abstinent marriage bed. It turned out the men couldn’t shake the idea that sex was “beastly” after the prohibition against it was lifted. They were surprised to find themselves still beset by temptation: pornography, masturbation, other women. What’s more, back when they were single, they had the support of other abstinent men. Once wed, they found that talking to friends about sexual problems was considered a betrayal of one’s wife, and they had no idea how to communicate with their spouses directly.
A young woman who had taken a virginity pledge in the Baptist Church at age ten told a similar story on the website xoJane. After marriage, she couldn’t let go of the shame and guilt that had been drummed into her: “Sex felt dirty and wrong and sinful even though I was married and it was supposed to be okay now,” she wrote. “Sometimes I cried myself to sleep because I wanted to like [sex], because it wasn’t fair. I had done everything right. I took the pledge and stayed true to it. Where was the blessed marriage I was promised?” Meanwhile, a 2011 survey of more than 14,500 people revealed that those who had fallen away from religion were more sexually satisfied and felt less guilty about their sex lives than they had when they were believers.
AT THE BALL, the girls and their fathers rose from their tables, looked into one another’s eyes, and exchanged vows. The girls committed themselves to purity. The men promised to “cover” their daughters, to lead, guide, and pray for them. The girls recited the following pledge: “Knowing that I’m worth waiting for, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children, to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity, from this day, until the day I enter into a biblical marriage relationship.” The couples then gathered at the back of the room. Each pair linked arms and, one by one, walked down the center of the dance floor, almost as if in a wedding. The fathers plucked silver tiaras from a basket and “crowned” their daughters; the girls then ch
ose a white rose from a second basket.
Brittan introduced me to Dave, a divorced thirty-nine-year-old entrepreneur, who was there with his fourteen-year-old daughter. “As a dad, what I want for her is the best life she can possibly have,” he told me. “And the truth is this: Whatever we do between the time we start becoming a young woman or man until we actually get married, whatever happens, whatever takes place in every relationship you have, whether it’s physical, emotional, or mental—every experience you have you’re going to bring that into a marriage. Purity can actually cut off at the root a lot of future pain. Instead of having to be healed of something, isn’t it better not to get sick in the beginning? Who can argue against that?”
Dave should know, he continued. He faltered before his own marriage, something he regrets and blames, in part, for its ultimate failure. “I went off to college and was on my own,” he said. “And I got off track. I did not surround myself with like-minded people. There was a lot of heartache and a lot of pain. That’s why I think this is so flipping important. We get told all the time no one will be abstinent, there’s no way they’ll do it. Why? It’s a choice.” He pointed to his daughter, who was standing silently beside him, twirling her white rose. “If someone put a gun to her head every day and said if you lose your purity, I’ll shoot you, I guarantee she wouldn’t lose her purity. It’s all about choice.”
Dave did not, at least on the surface, hold a double standard. Abstinence, to him, was as important for males as females. He planned to serve as a role model to his children, remaining chaste until (or unless) he remarried. He expected “purity” from his sons as well. Again, his concern seemed less about sex than the pain wrought by emotional intimacy—pain that others may consider essential to personal growth, to developing mature ideas and expectations of relationships.
Listening to Dave, it occurred to me that the idea that purity would protect either him or his children from divorce—that practicing the skills of emotional or physical intimacy before marriage threatens rather than enhances a partnership—seemed as much a fairy tale as the fake crown he’d just placed on his daughter’s head. I’ve been married nearly twenty-five years. Virginity, by the time of our wedding day long gone, was not something special or cherished my husband and I gave each other; our love and commitment were. That’s true for all the long-term married couples I know; it was equally true of everyone I know who has divorced. What’s more, if Dave really wanted his children to marry for keeps, he might want to start checking the real estate listings in liberal bastions such as New York, Boston, or San Francisco. Statistically, the strongest factor predicting higher divorce rates in any given county is its concentration of conservative or evangelical Protestants, in part because they marry and have children younger. Taboos against sexual experimentation and emotional intimacy may, then, boomerang on parents such as Dave, pushing their children to wed someone incompatible or before they’re ready so they can have an openly physical relationship.
It’s easy for those of us who think pledging is wacky to feel a little smug. Yet it occurred to me that these girls who were “virgins for God” weren’t really so different from those who imagined virginity as a “gift” or even those who saw it as an embarrassment: they all believed that one sexual act would magically transform them—for better or for worse—and they all risked harm to their sexual and emotional development as a result. They all based their worth, calibrated their self-respect, and judged other girls’ characters (tacitly or overtly) based on what was happening, or not happening, between their legs. And they all were still fundamentally defining themselves by their sexuality: by whether, when, where, with whom, and how many times they’d had intercourse.
By focusing on virginity, young people minimize (and often rush through) other forms of sexual expression, denying themselves the very opportunities for knowledge and experience that they seek. After all, moving slowly and intentionally with a partner is not only incredibly sensual, it’s vital to learning, truly learning, about desire, pleasure, communication, mutuality, intimacy. That’s ultimately far more life-altering than “achieving” intercourse. “‘Experience’ is a stupid way of thinking about it,” said Dennis Fortenberry, professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and one of the foremost researchers on adolescent sexuality. “If you think of it as a pool of experiences of closeness, warmth, desire, attraction, arousal, touch, orgasm—all those are part of the possibilities of sexual learning. That’s what young people should be doing. Learning about the incredibly nuanced thing we call sex that we assume will be part of their lives in different manifestations for the next sixty years or so. I don’t think I’ll see this in my lifetime, but what if we could even begin to think of actually saying to kids, ‘Spend a year or two having oral-genital sex with people that you want to do that with and really get to know what that’s about and then figure out what might follow.’”
I had walked into this ballroom unsettled, to say the least, by the white dresses, the wedding motif, the idea of fathers being made the guardians of girls’ “sexual purity.” The fathers were even given a Lucite-encased sixpence to keep as a symbol of their daughters’ virtue, until the girls’ wedding day (as in “something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe”). What could be more patriarchal, more regressive? At the same time, the sexualization so rampant in secular culture, which measures a woman’s value first and foremost by how “hot” she is, is little better. I utterly, vehemently disagree with how they approach it, but like me, these parents only want what’s best for their daughters; in their own way, they believe they’re helping their girls combat modern pressures and degrading stereotypes. Brittan talked to me about the “pornography epidemic” and the importance of “empowering” young people to “navigate the assault of sexuality everywhere they go” so that they can make ethical, responsible, “healthy sexual choices.” Like me, she believed that we should educate our children about sex “in a very direct way.” It was all the same language, yet the intent was completely different. To me, purity and hypersexualization are flip sides of the same coin. I’d rather girls were taught that their sexual status, regardless of what it is, is not the measure of their personhood, their morality, their worth.
The dads and daughters, having completed the crowning ceremony and signed a “covenant” of purity, took to the floor for their “first dance,” yet another ritual that mirrored a wedding. They looked so happy: the daughters basked in the attention of their fathers or mentors. I may not have agreed with the reason for the gathering, I may not have agreed with their message, but I did appreciate that fathers were communicating with their daughters at all, that they were taking time to deepen their bond with the girls: to create trust, to discuss ethics and values around sex. I interviewed more than seventy young women for this book: only two had ever had a substantive conversation about sex with their fathers. The rest just laughed when I raised the subject. Moms don’t fare much better: even those who believe they’ve talked to their daughters about sex tend to overestimate the efficacy, openness, and comfort level of those discussions. Somehow, once parents stopped saying “don’t,” many didn’t know what to say. So while it’s easy to be appalled by the blatant sexism of Purity Ball dads—and yes, I absolutely was—I am equally appalled that the alternative to them seems to be total silence.
After a song or two, the dads drifted off the dance floor, while the girls kicked off their high heels. They jumped around in little scrums to “clean” pop songs such as Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” As I slipped out the door, “Let It Go,” the anthem from Frozen, came on. At the chorus, like young women everywhere, the girls flung their arms extravagantly wide and belted the words. The fathers looked on, smiling indulgently, apparently unaware that the point of the song—“No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free!” and “That perfect girl is gone”—is that Elsa, the princess, is coming into her power, rejecting the restrictive, false morality that was imposed on he
r by her father, the king.
The Good-Person Checklist
Christina had known Brandon since kindergarten. They chased each other on the school playground, went to each other’s birthday parties at the local skating rink. He won first prize in the middle school science fair, she took second. They shared their first kiss after the winter formal during their junior year. Over time, their physical intimacy deepened, but the specter of the Church was never far from her mind. “It was like, ‘My boyfriend took off my shirt. What if other people find out?’” she recalled. “Even now, I can logically talk myself out of those feelings, but it’s all still there. There are degrees of shame and guilt that are probably permanently embedded in me. I wish that wasn’t so. It haunts a lot of my actions.” She paused thoughtfully. “But then, I don’t know where the line is between how I was raised and what’s just my personality. By nature, I’m a very cautious person.”
Perhaps. Yet when I met Christina, she was planning a semester abroad in Botswana, which seemed pretty nervy to me. She’d also purposely chosen to attend a college that would challenge her long-held values, and sought housing that would push her even further. Christina’s willingness to step so far out of the bubble of her upbringing—something that’s hard for any young person to do regardless of her politics—struck me as admirable, even brave. She couldn’t fully explain why she’d done it. It may have been because her parents weren’t as conservative as her teachers. Christina’s mother never contradicted the school’s teaching on chastity, but she drew the line at its condemnation of homosexuality as a sin. “She just told me straight out, ‘That’s not true,’” Christina said. Beyond that, though, Christina always felt different from her peers. The other kids in her grade were white, and she resembled her Filipino father; she was the only Asian in the entire school. In middle school, boys teased her about the shape of her eyes, the color of her skin; it made her feel, even to this day, unattractive, undesirable. That sense of difference, of alienation, may have been enough to set her searching.
Girls & Sex Page 9