The religious politics of puritan purity

As skepticlawyer observed at Club Troppo, the topic of the sexualisation of young girls through advertising and fashion caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. The context for the discussion was David Jones’ law suit against the Australia Institute.

While free speech was also an important theme of these recent debates, the interest and intensity show that discussions of the relationship between sexualisation of young girls and the public sphere touch some pretty sensitive spots. (It might be interesting to pause and wonder why there’s no discernible debate over the influence of advertising and pop culture on young boys’ sexuality.) One irony of such discussions is the fact that articles about the pernicious influence of pop culture on adolescent and tween sexuality often end up playing to the same celebrity hype and hyperbole that they purport to critique or dissect. A case in point is Newsweek’s piece on “Girls Gone Bad”.

Tracy Clark-Fory writes at Salon:

This time around it’s a meandering, confused cover story on how the publicised exploits of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan affect tweens and teens, and it addresses the burning question of whether we’re “raising a generation of ‘prosti-tots’.”

Reading the article proves just as painful as handing over a fistful of dollars in exchange for the issue, with its cover image of high-as-a-kite Britney and Paris paired with the headline “The Girls Gone Wild Effect”. Luckily, you become kind of numb after seeing Nancy Pelosi’s ascendancy in the House mentioned paragraphs away from a reference to Lindsay’s “fire crotch”. There’s a hasty rundown of the history of “bad girls” - complemented by a photo gallery, of course - which starts with Mae West and ends with the Brit Pack (or whatever they’re calling them these days). Ultimately - about 3,000 some odd words in - it concludes that our girls will be just fine because we adults “hold the purse strings” and, unless Paris releases a series of educational videos for toddlers, parents have a significant head start on imparting morals to our children.

She concludes:

The piece could have explored the more subtle ways that the highly publicized Brit Pack scandals affect the way girls feel about themselves (as opposed to whether it will turn them into little harlots or “prosti-tots”). The story also could have led with experts skeptical of the hysteria over the supposed proliferation of bad, mean or wild girls. Dan Kindlon, a professor of child psychology at Harvard, told the magazine plainly, “Sure, there are plenty of girls with big problems out there. Like the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos. But what percentage of the college population is that?”

Instead, the piece latches on with a vampiric thirst to parents’ worst fears and, as was probably the genesis of the piece, finds an excuse to talk about Britney’s vagina once more.

What such debates usually lack is any attempt to measure the dimension of the problems they point to (which are in turn, exaggerated out of any proportion in classic moral panic style). There’s no doubt that there are legitimate issues concerning the sexualisation of children, but they’re far too often elided behind a style of argument and writing which combines over-generalisation with dire predictions of imminent doom.

The (rather creepy) mirror image of the belief that sex has so invaded the public sphere and socialisation process of young girls that a generation of “prosti-tots” is being spawned is the obsession with purity to be found at the nether regions of the American religious right - the hardline home schooling wing of the “Virginity Pledge Movement”. From a left or liberal perspective, the snake in the grass is materialism and advertising. From the conservative evangelical perspective, changing representations in pop culture of sexuality are the work of the demon liberalism and to be countered by traditional family values.

The odd thing, as Jennifer Baumgartner observes in Glamour, is the weird sexualisation of the relationship between Christian fathers and their virgin daughters which swirls around the invented tradition of “Purity Balls”.

In a chandelier-lit ballroom overlooking the Rocky Mountains one recent evening, some hundred couples feast on herb-crusted chicken and julienned vegetables. The men look dapper in tuxedos; their dates are resplendent in floor-length gowns, long white gloves and tiaras framing twirly, ornate updos. Seated at a table with four couples, I watch as the gray-haired man next to me reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a small satin box and flips it open to check out a gold ring he’s about to place on the finger of the woman sitting to his right. Her eyes well up with tears as she is overcome by emotion.

The man’s date? His 25-year-old daughter. Welcome to Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball, held at the five-star Broadmoor Hotel. The event’s purpose is, in part, to celebrate dad-daughter bonding, but the main agenda is for fathers to vow to protect the girls’ chastity until they marry and for the daughters to promise to stay pure. Pastor Randy Wilson, host of the event and cofounder of the ball, strides to the front of the room, takes the microphone and asks the men, “Are you ready to war for your daughters’ purity?”?

The description of the daughter as her father’s “date” is not journalistic licence from Baumgartner. That’s the way that daughters are referred to when spending “daddy time” in these circles. And girls as young as four accompany their fathers to Purity Balls, though apparently it’s thought to be more appropriate just after menarche for the pledge of sexual purity and reciprocal virginal defence to be taken.

Though these balls are very much an invented tradition, and I doubt also that pledges to “save my first kiss for my wedding night” were ever encouraged in actually existing traditional families, there’s something genuinely traditional about the notion that a father owns his daughter’s sexuality:

The older girls at the Broadmoor tonight are themselves curvaceous and sexy in backless dresses and artful makeup; next to their fathers, some look disconcertingly like wives. In fact, in the parlance of the purity ball folks, one-on-one time with dad is a “date,” and the only sanctioned one a girl can have until she is “courted” by a man. The roles are clear: Dad is the only man in a girl’s life until her husband arrives, a lifestyle straight out of biblical times. “In patriarchy, a father owns a girl’s sexuality,” notes psychologist and feminist author Carol Gilligan, PhD “And like any other property, he guards it, protects it, even loves it”.

The anti-Paris pledge movement is relatively mainstream in America now - some studies suggest up to 10 per cent of American teens have taken virginity pledges. Other longitudinal studies on the pledgers show that 88 per cent of them have sex within three years of pledging. Disturbingly, STD rates are much higher for pledgers than the general population - a reflection of the fact that any discussion of safe sex is thought just to encourage sex. There are as yet no studies on those who’ve gone through the whole Purity Ball ritual.

So what do we have here? Two ostensibly politically opposed groups within society both believing that sex and sexualisation are massive problems for adolescents and pre-adolescents.

On the left, the Australia Institute crew believe that materialism and capitalism are to blame. On the right, it’s the decline of morality and the evils of liberalism, and the lack of religiosity.

In both instances, the target of the critique is individualism and choice - though it’s choice expressed through consumption in the first instance, and choice expressed through adolescent sexuality in the second. While these positions are somewhat polarised (and, as I’m arguing, the hype over the influence of advertising and pop culture is often talked up precisely to sell magazines and newspapers and thus more advertising space), there’s a strange parallelism going on.

I’m not meaning to suggest that cultural mores regarding children, adolescents and sexuality haven’t shifted. I’m not suggesting that advertising and pop culture don’t have a role to play. What I am suggesting is that in order to have an informed debate on these issues, and to think about their implications, is that we need less hype and more evidence and judicious discussion.

One of the interesting things about Baumgartner’s article is the way that she allows girls at the Purity Balls to speak for themselves. There’s a danger in assuming that children lack autonomy and agency - obviously they require protection in many instances but that’s not to say that their own beliefs and choices should just be legislated or proclaimed out of existence. And if we’re not to fall into the trap of seeing only evil everywhere as the Religious Right do, we need to know much more empirically what the situation as it stands is.