What are Purity Balls and why are we paying for them?
[Laughs] Purity Balls. I could talk about Purity Balls all day. Purity Balls are essentially daddy-daughter dances where young girls at some point in the evening will pledge their virginity to their fathers, and their fathers, in turn, will pledge to be the caretakers of said virginity. If you can watch a video it’s very, very disturbing. The language they use is mired in ownership and these really old school, antiquated norms about daddies owning their daughters. There’s one video where the fathers give the daughters a necklace–it’s a lock and a key. She keeps the lock and he keeps the key until the day she gets married and he gives the key/penis to her future husband. Very, very disturbing. [Purity Balls are] put on by crisis pregnancy centers, which are federally funded through abstinence only education money. What’s really interesting about them is when people started to complain, “Where are the mother-son purity balls?” and people started to call them out on their patriarchal bul
