According to an article in USA Today on Monday, there has been an advance in a new bonding experience for fathers and daughters: elegant chastity dances. I know this sounds weird, but it’s true. There has been a rise of these parties, especially in conservative Christian evangelical churches and they are gaining speed.
At these so-called “parties,” young girls wear T-shirts with slogans like “I’m Waiting” and “Virginity Lane: Exit When Married,” and are given promise rings by their fathers. They also sign contracts promising to wait to have sex until they are married.
If this isn’t an alarm going off for women’s sexual rights, I don’t know what is. With the Bush administration promoting abstinence-only programs in schools, how do we expect our daughters to know about their own sexuality and their bodies?
Why are we, as a society, condemning a woman’s right to express her sexuality and lifestyle choices?
The answer is that with the rise of the third wave of feminism, we are now experiencing another backlash in our culture to shove women’s rights back into the domestic sphere, where a husband can control his wife.
In this case, it is the father who is trying to control the young woman, until she is wed, and it becomes her husband’s problem. This control is gained by forcing these young girls to make a promise about their bodies that they don’t understand yet because they don’t want to disappoint their parents.
In the USA Today article, author Mary Zeiss Stange brings up the important point that 90 percent of these girls will have sex before they are married and that the percentage of unprotected sex will be even higher. I believe that there is also a stigma attached to girls married at a young age so that they can have sex.
I have personally seen this kind of behavior with some friends that I have gone to high school with. Instead of pursuing a college education or exploring the job market, many got married a year out of high school, and now have young children.
In each case, they strongly felt that they should wait to have sex until they were married, but why get married so young then? If it makes you happy, then more power to you, but our society shouldn’t place so much shame on women who choose to have sex before they are married.
Our patriarchal society places such a high emphasis on women’s purity that men’s promiscuity is ignored. It is also often suggested that having sex with many women is a male’s passage into manhood.
In the article, it is stated that mothers are almost completely absent from these balls and the mother’s role is questioned. Why is control of a girl’s sexual identity given to a man over a woman? Is a father really going to understand how it feels to have his body objectified or be pressured to have sex to please the men in his life?
That is not to say that women don’t also pressure men, but men pressure women to gain complete control, while women do it to just gain control of their sexual identity.
I believe that a strong woman should decide when and where she wants to have sex. A woman should not have to look toward a man to get permission over her own sexuality. No one knows more about a woman’s needs more than herself.
Brigid McGuire is a senior journalism major.
