Incessant Expressions

I saw another video about these last year and it blew my mind how bizarre these people are. Purity balls are fancy balls where fathers and daughters go to dance, hang out, share their views, and basically get all buddy buddy with each other. This is apparently something they cannot do at home for whatever reason. You can read the previous linked post about my thoughts on this stupid outmoded ritual. But I want to talk about this video.

The father in the video has 6 kids, 5 of them are girls. He likes to go on “dates” with his daughters (no, not those types of dates…yet) so they can bond. Again, this must be something they cannot do singularly or in a group at home. With 5 daughters, this may actually be somewhat true. But let’s look at the video again. This family is comprised of a mother and father who are “fundamentalist Christians” — their words, not mine — because they’re born again. The mother thinks it’s “completely natural” for her husband to go on dates with their daughters, again their words not mine. I think this is admirable since in such a large family, I can only imagine that getting good bonding time with 6 different kids is overly tough. But that’s really where I stop thinking they’re being admirable and being downright stupid and overprotective.

The ball is thrown so fathers and daughters can make promises to be pure, meaning abstinence until marriage. Whoops! The father’s already broken that vow by the fact that he’s got a daughter. I point this out because their wording is backwards and logically impossible as it is but I’m nit-picking. The mother in this video thinks if her daughters have premarital sex, they’ll suffer some unholy and irreconcilable psychological trauma and will end up probably ruining their future marriages over it. While that may be true, the same is more than possible (read: extremely likely) now that their daughters are being essentially sequestered away to date their father. The featured daughter of the story, whose name I couldn’t get because I can barely hear the audio on my laptop, looks at her girlfriends who have boyfriends and gets envious because she’s not experiencing the same thing. Now she’s guilty of harbouring two “deadly sins” of being both envious and lustful (which is not always sexual in nature), that’s not very Christian. This story just fell flat on its face because this girl is yearning to be in a normal relationship for her age.

The father has little idea of what kind of mental trauma he’s putting on this girl by taking her on dates, complete with limos and fancy dinners, but the mother seems fully aware. She seems to think this is preparing her for a joy-filled life with a future husband who is a carbon copy of her father. This guy may be sweet and nice and will probably end up sexually stifled, from attending the same purity balls, so that should turn out pretty well. It’s a gross generalization, I know, but the daughter is going to look for someone who embodies the same principles her parents indoctrinated her with. She’ll probably not see past that until it’s too late. Until she is suffering from psychological trauma at the hands of her husband who turns out to be crazy.

Now, these kids are also home-schooled. This in and of itself is not a bad idea but the daughter has a great justification for it: she won’t be exposed to the same whims that make “other people unpure.” That’s entirely true because at home, she’s not interacting with her peers in a true-to-life environment. She’s stuck in an overprotective bubble for a few hours a day, huddled away from normal things that normal kids do.

One of the best parts of this video is when some woman, a teacher I presume as she’s not introduced at all, lauds President Bush for his push for abstinence education. “Abstinence works every time!” she claims he said. Sure it does. It works every time. Every time until a kid gets an STD or hurts themselves because they weren’t taught about sex properly. If you abstain, you’ll never get any STDs or have any kinds of problems right? Because you abstained, right? Wrong. There’s scads of freely available data showing that abstinence education just leads to ignorance and ultimately, sexual issues with undereducated teens. Funny enough, there are more kids in schools that teach “abstinence only” curriculum that are getting pregnant than there are in schools where they teach sex ed (1, 2, 3, 4). There’s also more data showing these kids are at a much higher risk of contracting an STD because they’re simply clueless.

The best part of the video? It’s three quotes a little over 5 minutes in to about 6 minutes in.

I do believe it’s important to have that father figure, especially for a female. Um, I think women were created to feel accepted by men. (emphasis mine)

That’s by the mother of this family. And I’m not paraphrasing or taking this out of context, it’s what she said, verbosely. Women are on this planet to feel accept by and to appease men. Straight from a woman’s mouth.

I can offer myself as a priceless gift.

A female emcee, having the girls read off their purity vows. Yep, now women are gifts to men. So, not only are females created to feel accepted by men but they’re also gifts to men! Hell yes, this is might be a movement I can get behind!

God created men and women separate even though in the world today we want to think they’re the same. We are all different, thankfully. A woman needs to feel loved and accepted by her father, uh, she was created by God to feel that. (emphasis mine)

That’s from the father in the video. Now we have a fundamentalist Christian acknowledgment that women were created solely to feel loved by their fathers and other men. Apparently, God is very sexist and likes to play the emotional deviant.

The daughter of the video, whose name is Angela by the way (finally heard it clearly at the end), renounces kissing and “things like that” as bad and hopes she never does them. That’s verbose. So she can kiss her father and it’s okay but kissing a boy she might be interested in? Out of the question!

Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

[Via Fundie Watch]

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