Purity Portraits: Virgin Daughters, Dads, And Their Disturbing Photos

COMMENTARY — The term Purity Portraits was a new one on me when I stumbled upon the “share” that a fellow Facebook friend made on Thursday.

As I dug deeper into the post and witnessed the six photographs of these virgin daughters and their disturbing dads, a sickness started to set in along with the obligatory eye roll.

I had to read more.

First reported by the website BeautifulDecay.com, we’re informed that this sickness doesn’t stop with the pictures. There is actually an entire ceremony that goes along with it — called a “purity ball” — in which the daughter, sometimes as young as four years old, vows to stay pure for her father.

The dads usually recite some bit of creed like:

“You are married to the Lord and your father is your boyfriend.”

Swedish photographer David Magnusson captured these moments for his new book Purity. In it, Magnusson vows to neither “belittle nor glorify the ceremonies,” stating that “the interpretation [of the photographs] is all up to the eye of the viewer.”

In the 2008 documentary film The Virgin Daughters, the concept of the purity ball and pledge-to-dad was explored in more depth. According to the filmmakers, “one girl in every six pledges to remain a virgin, or to save her first kiss, until her wedding day” in America alone.

While I would certainly never knock the concept of virginity, nor have the audacity to think I know better than most when it comes to raising children — as a father with a baby daughter, I am certainly not looking forward to the hormone stage of parenting — this idea borders on child abuse, and might even break the psychological plane of it.

Whether well-intended or not, it places the child in an incredibly awkward position to be ridiculed and made fun of needlessly. Why can’t this sort of thing simply be taught sanely within the confines of the family home?

Have we all lost our minds so much as a society that our own child’s often-not-even-active-or-understood sexuality, must be held up on display and scrutinized for everyone on the Internet to see? Why must everything we do nowadays have an audience?

True parenting should be teaching your children the values you believe they need to succeed in life and be a good person. It should not be a ceremony or a Purity Portrait that makes some sort of self-absorbed statement.

With stories like this one and the recent engagement of Jill Duggar to a fiancé that she just met, do you think more fathers are going overboard in the lives of their daughters?