Where do young Christian girls learn that they are supposed to be sexually pure?  A photographer recently claimed that it was something girls wanted, something not imposed on them by their families.

As usual, your trusty editor at ILYBYGTH is behind the times.  Apparently, this series of purity-ball photographs by Swedish photographer David Magnusson attracted a good deal of attention several weeks ago.  At these balls, girls dress up in elaborate gowns, dance with their fathers, and finally pledge sexual abstinence.

Not surprisingly, bloggers and journalists reacted with some predictable outrage to this combination of precocious sexuality, gender coercion, and daddy-ism.  For instance, Tom Hawking called the photos “weird” and “terrifying.”  “It’s hard to know where to start with this:” Hawking wrote,

the notion of sex as “impurity,” the fact that it’s all daughters and no sons, the idea of dressing a preteen girl in something that looks awfully like a wedding dress.

The photographer presented himself as an intrigued outsider.  At first, Magnusson said, he thought these purity balls would be nothing more than another American tragedy.  As he remembered, “I imagined American fathers terrified of anything that might hurt their daughters’ or their family’s honor.” But as he learned more about them, he came to a new understanding. The balls represented something initiated often by the daughters themselves. As Magnusson put it,

It was also often the girls themselves that had taken the initiative to attend the balls. They had made their decisions out of their own conviction and faith, in many cases with fathers who didn’t know what a Purity Ball was before first being invited by their daughters.

As we’ve wrestled with before at ILYBYGTH, purity culture can have educational consequences. Some argue that purity culture encourages a culture of sexual victimization on the campuses of conservative Christian colleges.

But Magnusson’s claim raises new questions. If, as he asserts, girls don’t learn about purity balls from their families, where do they learn about them? More importantly, where do girls learn that they want to take part in this sort of ceremony? We should be skeptical about Magnusson’s claim that girls themselves chose freely to take part in these ceremonies. That sort of “choice” can involve all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle influence from parents and others. But it seems plausible that some girls embrace these ideas. And it seems plausible that some girls lead their fathers to this event, not vice versa.

If that’s the case, we need to wonder where girls got the idea. Certainly, some schools teach abstinence-only education curricula that promote a “purity” notion of proper femininity. And independent curricular programs such as True Love Waits have had success in reaching young people as parachurch organizations.

As always, these questions demonstrate the infinitely complicated nature of education. It is difficult to imagine a tradition like purity balls succeeding unless young people had been taught to embrace such a thing. Who taught them? And how?