The game of the father

Pledges of abstinence have been in vogue in the US since the early 1990s, and it is a virtue that must be worn on the sleeve.

“Lord, give me chastity, but not yet” is graffiti that is passé. In the US — where else? — chastity has been retrieved from the cobwebbed corners of the attic, carefully dusted and repackaged in an absurd concept of ‘Purity Balls’. This is a ‘ceremony’, no less, where a father pledges that he will remain faithful to his daughter’s mother, and the little girl in turn pledges to remain a virgin until she weds. Shock and awe?

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Pledges of abstinence, for what they are worth, have been in vogue in the US since the early 1990s, and it is a virtue that must be worn on the sleeve. Ok, so it’s worn on the finger in the form of a purity ring. A simple no, will-power, you-can-say-no spiel is best left to the management-types. For enterprising youngsters, a ring is enough to send out the message. While the purity ring is certainly a much classier accessory than the chastity belt, to take the practice to the levels of an occasion akin to a wedding is bizarre. Interestingly, mothers don’t have much of a say in this. Daddy ‘uncool’, it would seem, is more worried about his daughter’s ‘purity’ in the 21st century, than the mother.