The sickness spreads

The “Weekend” edition of Wellington’s Dominion Post newspaper reported that fundamentalists are bringing “purity” camps to New Zealand. The camps were inspired by the “purity balls” in America, where adolescent girls pledge their “purity” to their fathers in ceremonies that have a creepy similarity to weddings.

The article reports that the New Zealand camps will be focused more one “wholesome” activities than on chastity, but the leaders of the effort agreed it would be “awesome” if purity balls spread to New Zealand. That’s not the adjective I would’ve used.

I wrote recently about the media obsession with purity/chastity/virginity groups. I personally find this media obsession absurd, but not nearly as absurd as the programmes themselves.

There’s a high failure rate of such programmes. The article mentioned a local American-style fundamentalist church that says its abstinence programme has a 78% success rate (or 22% failure rate). However, the article provided no context. The article didn’t say how long those 78% maintained their pledges. If the period is short enough, any abstinence programme can claim a high success rate; the longer the time period, the more likely people are to break their pledges. All of which means that newspaper readers had no way to evaluate the accuracy of the church’s claim.

The thing that bothers me the most about the church-based chastity programmes is that they’re inherently sexist and misogynistic. Why are the girls pledging their purity to their fathers and not their mothers or to both parents? And why is it just girls? It’s because to fundamentalists, female sexuality is the property of men. The first owner is the father who eventually passes it on to the husband (traditionally shown in heterosexual weddings when the father gives the bride—and her virginity, symbolised by the white dress—to the husband).

If the fundamentalists were really serious about promoting “purity”, they’d seek it equally from boys and girls and both parents would be the recipients of the pledge. But doesn’t don’t fit well with a fundamentalist world view.

Most New Zealanders would be as sceptical about these fundamentalist programmes as I am, and probably equally as dismissive. New Zealanders just don’t need easy, simplistic fundamentalist answers to complex problems, which is the main reason that fundamentalists remain a small minority in this country. And most Kiwis would think that’s a good thing.