More Purity Ball Porn

For those of you who can't get enough of this cultural practice, here's the latest video. (Via Feministing, where Jessica says: "Pretty little hymens, all in a row[...]Puke.") The video is rather tedious, unfortunately.

It's funny because the music during the dance around the cross section is exactly the kind of music that the guy in my previous post was calling inherently ungodly due to its underlying rhythm.

I also find it weird that while the fathers recite a pledge, the daughters don't seem to speak. After all, it's the daughter's purity that is of concenrn. Souldn't she say something? The whole daughter's-virginity-as-property-of-the-father thing is just too creepy for me.

I like what this commenter said:

it also highlights how incredibly, sadly starved a tremendous number of Americans are for anything that is special, a ritual, a tradition. Our lives are pointedly devoid of such things - I bet a lot of these girls are just really, really excited to get dressed up and do something Special, and end up harnessed to an oppressive message of patriarchal domination and control.

I think we do need to have more ritual in our society. It seems like many people in our society never get to feel special, and that can be very painful. It's hard because many of the old rituals we can no longer believe in, because our values have changed. It's also sad that many rituals have become so commercialized. Weddings, proms, graduations, bar/bat mitzvahs, and even funerals all have industries behind them. These industries of course want us to spend more and more money, and don't necessarily have an incentive to make sure the rituals actually do what they are supposed to do: say in the language of the deepest part of our being that this event is important and needs to be marked.

I think this is one place where churches could really play an important role. They are some of the few institutions left that should be more concerned with our spiritual development than getting our money.