To think the concept of pledging your virginity to your father is creepy as hell?

[Sigyn]

Purity balls and the quiverfull movement so beloved of the Christian fundamentalist right in America.

Its obviously regressive as hell. Your sexuality is yours to control. It has nothing to do with your dad in any way shape or form.

But even aside from that-just...eeew. Sorry.

Can anyone explain to me how the concept of pledging your sexuality to your father for safekeeping is not just icky?

I used to have a purity ring...wore it from the age of 9 to 17, then got my first boyfriend and the ring mysteriously vanished....whoops....slightly awkward as all the kids at school could see the ring was gone the next day...

There is no mother/son purity thing because of the dual standards around men and women.

But I have a son and - just no. It illustrates for me nicely what is the other issue with this one. While both dp and I are open with the kids about sexuality, its tacitly accepted that ds goes to dp for Important Conversations and dd comes to me.

I want to make very clear that this is really not the norm in the homeschooling movement. However, that's how I know about it. Its far from common, but its also not unknown, at least locally to me.

Re: Rapture Ready, does God provide WiFi for Rapture? I have images of all of these people, butt naked, scrolling through the forum for the thread entitled

I have been Raptured, what now?! Your guide to life in the ever after!

As for the tagline on the website "Behold, I come quickly", sorry but I cant stop laughing at that

Just no.

As an aside, if I had saved myself for marriage I imagine I would have married my teenage boyfriend and had a miserable sex life.

Ehric, the Stay At Home Daughters movement is yet another delight within fundamentalist Christianity in the US. Daughters are home-schooled, do not get jobs, stay in their parental home and devote their lives to perfecting domestic skills and caring for their million younger siblings under their father's authority, until they marry (presumably someone daddy has picked out)...

The stay at home daughter movement is similar to the attitude many traveler families have to daughters isnt it?

So appalled by this concept. Have been angry about The Silver Ring Thing for years and am equally angry about this.

That is a brilliantly informative leaflet CorusKate How on earth have all the myths around virginity been maintained?

It says that not even a doctor can tell if you are a virgin or not, there is no membrane to 'push through', not everyone bleeds (and if you do it's not from a popped hymen) and horse riding/bike riding cannot break your hymen. I was taught all those things in school, but they're all bollocks

What about those poor women being 'tested' for virginity in arranged marriages. And getting surgery to ensure they'll bleed on their wedding night

There are places in America and Canada where this is quite mainstream.

Name them, please. Purity balls are not mainstream. The reason they get so much attention is that they are so bizarre.

A very good book on some of the topics touched on in this thread is "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement" by Kathryn Joyce. She also wrote an eye-opening book about aspects of religiously motivated adoption "The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption."

Two huge sex scandals have recently come out of this movement. Google Bill Gothard (oh, my, just realising the nasty pun of his name!), the main 'patriarch' of the movement, and Dougie Phillips.

This stuff leads to child sex abuse. It's not Christian in any shape or form, in fact it's evil.

No, this is not mainstream in America. It's relatively fringe. However a recent worrying trend has been for more mainstream Christian leaders to seem happy enough to be associated with these freaks.

"As for the tagline on the website "Behold, I come quickly", sorry but I cant stop laughing at that"

eeeeew - what? Why on earth would you pledge your virginity to your Dad Sorry but that just sounds so creepy and wrong.

You want another one?

"the climax of the second coming" had me snorting too. They wouldnt want me, I would be Finbaar Saunders throughout the sermons :o

I remember a quiverfull proponent seriously telling my (then) partner in all honestly wouldn't he rather a "full quiver".

He was a good doctor. Not so sure about the theology.

This blog is by a woman who was 'raised quiverfull' and she talks a bit about the creepy purity balls as well as about the damage the teaching did to her sexuality.

That she'd been told so much that sex and arousal was wrong and was then expected to leap into swinging from the chandeliers when married. Apologies for lack of clicky link. I'm on my iPad and am not clever enough to make it clicky

www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/raised-quiverfull

Clicky link

Thanks for posting it, Meadow

Goodness, I'd never heard of this. How odd.

It puts me in mind of fathers who say of their baby daughters "No boy will get near her, no boyfriend till she's 25...." that kind of bollocks, fathers vetting boyfriends. It's cringeworthy and creepy and is all part of the same awful concept, that men control female sexuality.

But the formal ceremony thing is utterly wrong and makes my skin crawl.

I'm still laughing at the 'buttered knife in the untouched jam' scenario.

I would be sniggering too much at all the double entendres to be allowed in the gang.

oh the patheos blog is really sad. I've been following her for a while.

I think its one of those things that exists in a culture. Its not individual families being weird. So while it is not something that exists in whole areas of the US, if you are growing up in this culture it really will be your whole world and you won't see a way to escape. You would probably see it as normal.

Bear in mind that kids who grow up in the purity ball cultures are very often homeschooled, have very limited contact with the world outside their church, etc.

It does seem that abuse is absolutely rife in the movement too

(note that although the blog is called "homeschoolers anonymous" its NOT actually an anti-homeschooling blog. Its an anti daughters-at-home/patriarchal Christianity blog, where homeschooling is often used as a technique to keep children isolated. The only criticism most posters have of their education is that it wasn't very good because no one was that bothered about girls being educated.)

Bogeyface re traveller families. I don't know a huge amount but my understanding is that there is subtle difference. I agree that traveller families do sometimes, for religious/cultural reasons, put great store on purity. I think they are generally trying to protect their daughters for their own sake. I am not quite sure how to put it but the difference is that with the quiverful movement, girls are a commodity, and their purity reflects on the father. I'd say that the traveler community (and to a much greater extent, actually, the Gypsy/Roma community) have a deep belief in purity. They also have a lot of rules, and everyone has to follow those rules.

Its a very complex and diverse community, considerably more complex and diverse than the Daily Fail or My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding would have us believe!

Oh dont get me wrong, I do realise that there is a massive religious difference, I was talking purely about the lack of education and the assumption that there wont be work out of the home but simply that they will be wives and mothers.