Great article in the NYT. Hey, maybe it's not to late to throw your own!
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/purity-balls-local-tradition-or-national-trend.html?_r=1
‘Purity Balls’ Get Attention, but Might Not Be All They Claim
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: July 20, 2012
In 1998, in Colorado Springs, Randy Wilson threw the first “purity ball,” a formal dinner and dance at which he and other fathers signed pledges to protect the virginity of their unmarried daughters. This October, Mr. Wilson will host his 13th purity ball (they have been almost annual). And from the first ball to now, the Wilson family has made an industry of purity.
Caitlyn Carlson attended a “purity ball” with her father, Dave York.
Related
Dancing the Night Away, With a Higher Purpose (May 19, 2008)
Matthew Staver for The New York Times
Ms. Carlson says there was no deeper meaning to the ball. “It was a chance to dress up and dance with my friends and hang out with my dad.”
A field director for the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian organization, Mr. Wilson has promoted purity balls across the United States, and his Web site says they have been held in 48 states. He and his wife, Lisa, have written a book, and they sell a “purity ball packet” for $90.
Three of their five daughters also wrote a book, “Pure Woman.” One of those daughters, Jordyn Wilson Peppin, runs the Purely Woman School of Grace, a weeklong program where “ladies” can learn a godly path to “etiquette, grace and hosting.”
The media have lustily promoted the Wilsons. The family has been featured on Anderson Cooper’s television show, in magazines like Glamour, in many newspapers, includingThe New York Times, and in at least two documentaries: one, a Swiss production called “Virgin Tales,” was released this summer.
But there is something fishy about all this media attention.
Despite all the coverage of the Wilson family and their balls’ dramatic imagery — the girls doing ballet, placing roses before a cross, ballroom-dancing with their dads — there is little hard evidence that purity balls have spread much beyond Colorado Springs. And even some alumnae of Mr. Wilson’s dances express skepticism that they had much effect.
In her 2010 book “The Purity Myth,” the feminist writer Jessica Valenti, founder of the blog feministing.com, reported that “more than 1,400 purity balls” were held in 2006. Her footnote refers to a 2007 article by Jocelyne Zablit, who gives as the source of that figure Leslee J. Unruh, the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, in South Dakota. Reached by telephone this week, Ms. Unruh was rather more vague with her figures.
Her organization had 4,600 “inquiries” about purity balls in one recent 12-month period, Ms. Unruh said. The inquiries were “for purity ball planners that eventually went out, or that a staff person had a phone conversation with.”
Mr. Wilson said that he himself always doubted the figure of 1,400 purity balls a year, which he first heard in the news media. It was also reporters, he said, who gave him the figure he uses on his Web site.
“They reported them being held in 48 different states,” Mr. Wilson said.
Ms. Unruh said that however many balls actually occur, the idea has spread, and many chastity-promotion events now go by other names. There are “father-daughter balls,” and there are “Knights to Remember” dances, for mothers and sons.
And Ms. Unruh even counsels some organizers against calling their events purity balls.
“I tell them, ‘Use another name,’ ” Ms. Unruh said. “If you call it a purity ball, the media will want to come, then it’s not a private night for daughters and dads, it’s a fiasco. They want to follow the father, follow the daughter, take pictures of everyone getting dressed, and it ends up not being a night that is special.”
But there are other reasons organizers would shy away from the “purity ball” name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/purity-balls-local-tradition-or-national-trend.html?_r=1
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