The New York Times magazine is running a long piece on the growing movement to attack contraception. There is a lot to unpack in the article. I was going to do so later but then I read about “purity balls” and I just couldn’t wait.
Contra-Contraception – New York Times:
Leslee Unruh, a 51-year-old former motivational speaker who says that her life was transformed in 1984 by the psychological devastation wrought by having an abortion, is the doyenne of the abstinence movement. She has dedicated herself to fostering in teenagers a holistic approach to relationships. Like many in the abstinence movement, Unruh says she believes that society is unhealthily focused on sex and that dwelling on contraception makes it worse. “I see the problem as a lack of teaching about relationships: how to bond with the person you’re going to have a relationship with, so that it’s something that’s good for you,” she says. “We teach kids it doesn’t have to be physical.”
In addition to providing an information center for the abstinence industry that has blossomed in recent years, she takes her message directly to kids. Besides “Girls Gone Mild,” she sponsors “Purity Balls,” which fathers attend with their teenage daughters. “We think the relationship between fathers and their daughters is the key,” she told me. At the purity ball, a father gives a “purity ring” to his daughter — a symbol of the promise she makes to maintain her virginity for her future husband. Then, during her marriage ceremony, the daughter gives the ring to her new husband. Abstinence Clearinghouse’s Web site advertises the purity ball as an event “which celebrates your ‘little girl’ and her gift of sexual purity.”
Last night I finished the first chapter, “Governing Women in British North American,” in Belonging to the World: Women’s Rights and American Constitutional Culture (Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights)” (Sandra F. VanBurkleo). The chapter traces the interaction of women with family, social, and legal structures from, roughly, 1630 (when “English settlement of North America began in earnest”) to the Revolution. With Colonial women’s lives fresh on my mind, I saw a striking similarity between “purity balls” and Colonial notions of patriarchy. To wit:
Eighteenth-century Philadelphians thought of adultery less as a sex crime than as a political challenge to the “husband who was master of his wife”; much as the kidnapper of a man’s wife had not violated her rights so much as “stolen another man’s cargo,” so the adulterous male undermined the husband’s authority of his dependents. Prerevolutionary colonists tied manhood to household mastery; a man who could not control his wife or servants was “not a full member of the civil community of adult men.” . . . In New England, courts intervened on the complaints of husbands or fathers to end unauthorized liaisons, and to some extant, the magistracy’s defense of the family aimed to prevent adultery and sexual abuse of daughters. (VanBurkleo, 29).
I was stuck by the similarity between Colonial notions of patriarchy and the sentiment implicit in purity balls. Namely, that the father controls his daughter’s sexuality until she has a husband. Whereupon the husband controls her sexuality. The purity balls even include a physical token of control–the ring.
Ironically, the modern conservative Christian obsession with virginity and purity stands in marked contrast to Puritan views. The article connects the modern view to Catholic influence, which is noteworthy (and adds even more irony) in light of Puritan views on “Popish conceits”:
And within limits, New England women who were violated by men may have been helped by the fact that Puritan judges expected everyone to sin, did not pathologize sex more than the English did generally, and could believe tales of male lust run amok. But the expectation of male misbehavior also subjected women to ongoing, low-level sexual “play,” and judges, rather than women, drew the line between revelry and crime. Puritans encouraged moderate enjoyment of “the flesh,” insisting that the use of the marriage bed was “founded in man’s Nature.” Although they discouraged sexual relations outside betrothal and marriage, they forgave fleshly appetites and sometimes associated the veneration of “pure” women with the “Popish conceit of the Excellency of Virginity.” . . . In Connecticut, where premarital pregnancy was commonplace, ministers and judges simply enjoined couples to marry; in Hingham, Massachusetts, between 1721 and 1800, 41 out of 100 women aged 15-19, and 23.8 out of 100 aged 20-24 were pregnant at first marriage. (VanBurkleo, 25).
The notion that contraception or abortion promotes promiscuity (“An editorial in the conservative magazine Human Events characterized the effect of such legislation as ‘enabling more low-income women to have consequence-free sex.’” Contra-Contraception.) is patently disproved by the high rates of promiscuity in historical evidence. Similarly, modern evidence indicates, following Roe, the number of abortions changed little. That is, women simply shifted from having unsafe and illegal abortions to having safe and legal abortions. (Hull & Hoffer, Roe v. Wade: The Abortions Rights Controversy in American History (University Press of Kansas, 2001), 149). People have always and will always have lots of sex. The only question worth asking is: Who must bear the burden of the results? Without access to contraception and safe abortion the answer would be women.