The Creepy Way Fathers Across the Country Are Controlling Their Daughters’ Virginity

At this point, you’re married to the Lord, and your father is your boyfriend.”

So says Pastor Ron Johnson to his 12-year-old daughter Caroline, before placing a ring on her left finger. Johnson and his family are the subject of a recent Nightline Prime investigation of Purity Balls, a “full-fledged national phenomenon” that has reportedly spread across 48 states and 17 countries. Despite the thought that first popped into my head, these balls are not some ironic term for Ben Wa sex toys, but rather formal father-daughter dances during which young girls pledge to abstain from all sexual activity until marriage (this includes kissing and dating). They also symbolically entrust their fathers — the “high priest” of the home — with their maidenheads for safekeeping.

The special was filmed back in October 2013, when Nightline reporters headed to the 14th annual “Super Bowl of Purity” (only in America, folks) to document the chaste event. As the cameras rolled, 60 father-daughter couples arrived at the Grand Ballroom of Colorado’s Broadmoor Hotel to “celebrate the beauty of [their] daughters and the glory of their fathers.”

Creeped out yet? You should be. Purity Balls might seem like a quirky, inoffensive ritual of uber-religious middle America, but they’re emblematic of some very messed up attitudes about women and their sexuality that have serious implications beyond these communities.

Purity Balls stem from purity pledges, a practice that developed in the late ’80s and early ’90s in response to increased sexual liberation, the AIDS epidemic and rising rates of STDs and teen pregnancy. In 1998, five years after the Southern Baptist group True Love Waits popularized the first purity pledge cards, Randy Wilson and his wife Lisa held the inaugural Purity Ball.

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