Ball promotes a chaste lifestyle

Friday night, Lauren Desmarchais, 17, will dig her light teal prom dress out of storage and style her auburn curls into an up-do.

She’ll spend the night dining and dancing at the Castle at Ashley Manor, a fairytale-like wedding reception ballroom in Chandler.

The senior at Scottsdale Christian Academy won’t be joined by the boy she’s been seeing for several months. In fact, she’s sharing her escort with her sister, Shalyn.

Their date? Dad.

“I think this will be a fun night to hang out with our dad, get all dressed up and have fun,” said Shalyn, 21, a nursing student. “The average age of the group is going to be a bit younger than us, so we can go to be examples for them, too.”

Ken Desmarchais is escorting his two daughters, as well as one of their friends, to the Valley’s first “Father-Daughter Purity Ball.”

The balls are designed as a way to promote sexual abstinence for the girls — and moral purity for them and their fathers.

After a formal dinner and dancing, and a keynote address by Miss Arizona 2006 Hilary Griffith, participants will sign a “covenant call to purity.”

“That’s just a commitment between the two of them that the daughter is going to try her best to learn and be educated about living a pure life, and the father’s commitment to the daughter to help educate her and to help as she grows older and faces those temptations,” said Mona McDonald, the event’s organizer.

The girls will then lay white roses on the foot of an illuminated cross, as symbols of their commitments.

The purity balls have been spreading across the country since 1998, when they were created by a minister and his wife in Colorado Springs. Similar balls have already been held in Tucson for five years. The same sponsors — Arizona Baptist Children’s Services and New Life Pregnancy Center — will hold their first in the Valley, and in Yuma, this year.

“It gives them a great chance to get together and get all dressed up fancy and the dads teach their daughters what a date should be like,” said McDonald, a Scottsdale mother who has been working to make the ball a reality for nearly two years

She said families with young girls don’t often delve into topics of sexuality, choosing instead to talk about purity in more general terms.

When one of her own daughters first attended a ball at age 10, for example, McDonald spoke to the girl about reading books and watching TV that supported Christian principles, and hanging out with supportive friends.

“I recognize that every family has their own beliefs,” she said. “I would say to my daughter that, because we love God, we want to do our best to live a pure life...we wouldn’t have out in one another’s bedrooms alone, that kind of stuff.”

Purity balls are part of a larger moral movement, which some dub a “purity revolution,” led predominantly by evangelical Christian churches. They believe society is sexualizing children at younger and younger ages.

Pop radio stations play odes to strippers and sex acts. Shirts bearing slogans like “porn star” dot high school hallways. So the call to return to a more modest lifestyle strikes a chord with many families.

“Women do have the right to choose, and you can see a lot of time women kind of almost get abused because they’re just so open,” Lauren said. “I don’t want to degrade anyone, but I think the value of a woman would all go up just if we had a set standard of how we honor ourselves.”

Although the balls involve sparkles, frills and ballroom dancing, Arizona State University Professor Charles Barfoot classifies them as a part of a growing “hard-edge Christianity.”

Some girls wear rings and t-shirts that state their virginity, and organizers of the Chandler ball will even distribute small silver necklaces that state, “worth the wait.”

“It’s ... almost a return to fundamentalism,” Barfoot said. “It’s more in-your-face.”

He puts purity balls in the same category.

“There’s some good in that, certainly,” he said. “I remember when I held my little baby... I wanted her to remain pure. We’re living in an age when one sexual mistake can cost you your life.”

Yet he has misgivings about some aspects of the balls, including what happens if the girls break their covenants.

In his religion classes, he assigns students to write their religious autobiographies. He said he sees many students who have been emotionally damaged after they failed to live up to their ideal of chastity.

“It’s like the story of the Prodigal Son, but it’s really the story of the waiting father,” he said. “If you translate that parable to today, and the father signs this pledge of purity, would he welcome the daughter back home? I don’t know.”

It’s not the only concern.

References to treating daughters like “princesses,” and the father’s pledge to be “high priest” of the home smack of old-fashioned patriarchal efforts to control female sexuality, says Breanne Fahs, an assistant professor of women’s studies at ASU.

“When your father gives you away at a wedding — I think the balls sort of reenact that system,” Fahs said. “Then, when women get married, the father sort of gives permission to the new husband to have sex with her. That model is interesting because it hearkens back to a more literal act of women being traded between men, which is troubling ... They’re customs that are akin to commerce. In some ways, it’s about sex and in some ways, it’s about women being inscribed as property.”

Fahs said she believes most parents — religious and political affiliations aside — want their daughters to experience a positive, first sexual encounter. And she believes there are other ways to ensure that beyond participating in a Purity Ball.

McDonald has heard such criticism before.

“There’s some negatives out there about balls, and I welcome those, because I think it makes dads think about the purpose of what they’re doing,” she said. “The bottom line is they cannot make their daughter abstain from sex — that’s not going to happen. But it gives them the opportunity to educate (the girls).”

Both Shalyn and Lauren said they first made the pledges at their Baptist church when they were in their mid-teens.

“My whole life, I’ve been taught the idea of purity and what it stands for, and how sacred it is,” Shalyn said. “In no way have Lauren or I ever been forced to make that decision, and I feel like, for the girls at this ball, it’s not going to be like that either.”

Shalyn and her boyfriend of four-and-a-half years abide by the rules they’ve created, she said. They still listen to mainstream country music, they watch regular movies — although sometimes she will fast-forward over a particularly steamy sex scene, she said. And the family does skip watching MTV.

“Not everyone has chosen to wait, which is fine,” she added. “I don’t judge the people who have made that decision...It’s just a different lifestyle.”