Well, this is just a tad creepy — grown men play-acting the trappings of getting married to their pre-pubescent daughters. A lot of underlying ownership of females mentality (you’re daddy’s property so don’t damage the goods until I hand you off to your approved husband) going on here, too.

No sex please, we’re daddy’s little girls

It has all the ingredients of a wedding. The proud tuxedo-clad father, the frosted white cake, the limousines and an exchange of vows.

But there is no groom and the girl in the long gown is no bride. She’s daddy’s little girl, there to take a vow of chastity.

In what is becoming a trend among conservative Christians in the United States, girls as young as nine are pledging to their fathers to remain virgins until they wed, in elaborate ceremonies dubbed “Purity Balls.”
[…]
Many fathers at the ceremonies also slip “purity rings” around the finger of their misty-eyed daughters or offer them “chastity bracelets” and other jewelry that the girls can entrust to their husbands on their wedding night.

Creepy and, apparently, pointless.

But critics say that while teaching abstinence to children may be laudable, it is just as essential to make them aware of sexually transmitted diseases and condom use.

They also point to studies showing that the majority of adolescents who take purity pledges break them within a few years, often by engaging in risky and unprotected sex.

One study conducted by researchers at the universities of Columbia and Yale found that 88 percent of pledgers wind up having sex before marriage.

This got some press last year like this editorial and another one about these balls. Here’s what Glamour magazine had to say about the pledge to “Keep your flower safe!”

And then there’s this sort of related story about a chastity march in San Fransisco, of all places. Amazingly, some disagreed: