Letters to the Editor
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I idolize my father...
...but if he had ever said words like that in my presence, I would have cracked up laughing at him, when *I* was eleven.
Of course, part of the reason my father is worth idolizing is that he would never, ever participate in anything this idiotic, and in fact would probably have been the first person to mock the entire ceremony.
I seem to recall feeling like a princess when I was four because my grandfather said I was "dazzling", but honestly, I got a lot more of a feeling of closeness to my male relatives when they did things like take me mountain climbing or show me how to collect coins or write a program in BASIC. Women don't need fathers "covering their purity" when they are eleven if the fathers really want the girls to stay pure; they need fathers who teach them that they can get positive male attention by using their brains and not their booty. Given that I was in grad school when I finally lost it, my dad could not have been more successful at getting me to "keep myself pure" as a teen if he'd *tried*. And the reason is, I thought men who would validate me only for being attractive and not for being smart were a total waste of my time, because that was what my dad taught me to expect from men, by respecting my mind and personality.
These poor girls have dads who respect them only for being pretty pure princesses on a pedestal. Some boy comes along when they're fifteen who convinces them that he'll put them on a pedestal too, and they'll be easy meat.
You can't teach your daughter to respect herself if you don't respect her, and you can't keep her from being prey for some sweet-talking guy if she doesn't respect herself. (If she does, she may still *choose* to have sex younger than you'd like, but it will be by free choice, not because she feels like she's got to to keep a boy's attention. She won't be prey, she'll be actively making choices, and they will likely be informed ones.) If any of these girls stay virgins until they marry it'll probably be in spite of the dads rather than because of them.
And... yeah. Where are the moms or the sons in this? Admittedly the concept of mothers pledging to keep their sons pure is even creepier than fathers doing it to their daughters (probably because, since it's not a societal norm, women who do do it usually come across as mentally ill), but couldn't mothers pledge to teach their sons respect for women and eleven-year-old boys pledge to honor their future wives as they honor their mothers, or something? (I am not saying I think this is a good idea, mind, but it *should* be a natural outgrowth of the same mindset that's behind this whole father-daughter purity thing.)