Randy Wilson wants to change that. With his bright smile, steady eye contact and the erect posture of a small but confident man, he reminds me of the magnetic self-help guru that Tom Cruise portrayed in Magnolia. "Way to go, men!" Wilson says. "I applaud your courage to look your daughter in the eye and tell her how beautiful she is. If you haven't done it yet, I'll give you a chance to do it right now."
I strike up a conversation with Christy Parcha, an 18-year-old brunette who's here to perform a ballet later on; her 10-year-old sister is attending the ball with their dad, Mike, a math teacher at a local community college. Christy's eyes are bright, her cheeks flushed, and a smile permanently animates her face. Although she just graduated from high school, she is not going to college but instead will be teaching ballet classes, continuing with piano lessons and writing a book about "emotional purity," which Christy thinks is even more important than the physical kind. "I am just trying to reserve all those special feelings for my husband," she says ardently.
As it turns out, not allowing herself to think sexual thoughts makes her nervous, too, because she wants to experience pleasure with her future husband: "I don't want to be a burden to him in that I am not enjoying [sex]." Recently, a friend took her to see a movie about Queen Esther, One Night With the King—"a really romantic story," according to Christy. "So I watched it and I had these huge feelings rise up inside me, and I was like, OK, they are still there!'" she says, flopping back in her chair with relief. Still, Christy doesn't want to date. She associates sex outside of marriage as a girl "getting used, betrayed, having guys deceive you, all that kind of thing."
Other girls at the ball are far less eloquent about the pledge they've just made. To them, the excitement of the ball is buying fancy dresses and primping; one 14-year-old in the bathroom tells me she started getting ready at 9 A.M. When I ask Hannah Smith, 15, what purity means to her, she answers, "I actually don't know." Her older sister Emily jumps in: "Purity, it means…I don't know how to explain it. It is important to us that we promise to ourselves and to our fathers and to God that we promise to stay pure until…. It is hard to explain." I suspect that the girls' lack of vocabulary has to do with a universal truth of girlhood: You don't want to talk about sex with anyone older than 18, particularly your dad. At the same time, the girls seem so unsure of the reasons behind their vows that I can't help but wonder if they've just signed a contract whose terms they didn't fully understand.
There is no data on whether girls who attend purity balls remain abstinent until marriage; chances are many do, given the tight-knit communities they live in. But there is striking evidence that more than half of teens who take virginity pledges—at, say, rallies or events—go on to have sex within three years, according to findings of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the most comprehensive survey of teens ever taken. And 88 percent of the pledgers surveyed end up having sex before marriage. "No pledge can counter the fact that teenagers are, in fact, sexual beings postpuberty," notes Cary Backenger, a clinical psychotherapist in Appleton, Wisconsin, who works with teens, including several who have taken virginity pledges. "You can't turn that off."
