Let's stop focusing on our daughters' vaginal state as a barometer of their worth as humans

Speaker Mike Johnson's involvement in "Purity Ball" culture is beyond creepy

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) creeping on his teenage daughter for Jesus.

Scott, you are the salt of the earth. Oh, I'm sorry, excuse me. I meant scum of the earth.

• Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

I kept sniffing her, and I stroked her neck—like an artist would with an empty canvas and a fine brush.

• Nick Oliveri, Monsters in My Mind: A Gripping Novel on Mental Health

The story of Speaker Mike Johnson's hyper-Christian creepiness keeps getting weirder almost daily. First, it was the disclosure that he and his teenage son were each other anti-porn and anti-masturbation “accountability partners.” That by itself should set off alarms.

But wait…there’s more. There’s been a constant drip-drip-drip of creepy/weird revelations about his beliefs that are as hair-raising as they are strange.

Yes, the man has issues.

It has been firmly established that Speaker Mike Johnson is a lunatic extremist Christian supremacist who holds views that are repellent to all good and normal people. He holds views repellent to most Christians.

This family is not the evangelicals next door who are kind of weird, and you definitely don’t want to be best friends, but they’re nice enough and you’d trust them to watch your house while you were out of town. This is the extremist sleeper cell next door that all the neighbors avoid, but gossip about endlessly. If they come outside, the neighbors go in.

Recently, it was revealed that Johnson and his son either are or recently were each other’s porn cops, i.e. each got APB alerts from Covenant Eyes Christian anti-cumwhacking software if the other started looking at porn. This was discovered through some good old fashioned journalism, namely the kind where a person willingly sits through hours of Mike Johnson babbling to his church about how he and his son and the Lord work together to help Mike and Junior keep their hands off their respective wangpeeners. (His son was 17 at the time.)

I know what you’re thinking…. "But he looks so benign?” Sure, he does, but when you listen to Mike Johnson speak, the guy’s a scary mofo, knowhutimean? It’s as if he’s from another planet; the man’s bent on taking over this one, and he means business.

Anyway, the latest WAY creepy revelation about Mike Johnson is about his teenage daughter and purity balls. For the uninitiated, a purity ball is like a prom in which a father takes his daughter, and the daughter pledges not to have sex until her wedding day.

Yes, it’s every bit as creepy and cringe-worthy as it sounds.

ABC News reports on the 2015 segment it found from Germany’s n-tv, wherein Johnson and his sicko wife openly talked about Daddy’s big date with his offspring, and how he got her to sign the certificate promising not to break her dad’s heart by fucking.

"This looks like a wedding," a news reporter says in German in a 2015 n-tv news segment that was unearthed by ABC News. "But they are not bride and groom -- but rather father and ... daughter," the reporter adds, referring to Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah.

If fundamentalist Christians created their own PornHub, this would be a category.

Ewww….

If this sounds as if it could be ripe for child sexual abuse, it’s because it is, though it’s seldom spoken of within the Evangelical community.

ABC News explains that the segment wasn’t just about Johnson and his date (his daughter), but also featured other grown men and their dates (their daughters). And yes, we are not kidding when we say the report featured Johnson’s daughter saying her promise-not-to-fuck vows, to Daddy.

The news segment […] features interviews with Johnson's daughter, who is now in her 20s, and shows her at the purity ball pledging to her father "to make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children ... to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity," in between shots of Johnson nodding along in agreement.

That’s an “If you see something say something” situation if there ever was one.

In one brief interview clip, Johnson's wife Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor, told the German news outlet, "We don't talk to her about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question."

Sure, if you never talk about it, that seals it; it will never happen. Problem solved, eh?

Yeah, we never consider the possibility that our daughter might give in to peer pressure (or paternal pressure). We just naïvely assume that she’ll honor her vow and stick to butt stuff or oral sex. We don’t want her getting knocked up and pissing off Jesus.

So, you’re going to trust your 13-year-old daughter, who’s not old enough to truly understand sex and sexuality, to resist the urges that come with being a teenager…even though you’re going to provide her with no information whatsoever?

Uh, yeah…tell me you’re an unfit parent without telling me you’re an unfit parent, eh?

This isn’t even ordinarily characteristic of Evangelical Christianity. It’s a highly extremist arm of Evangelicalism. Along with purity balls come things like purity rings, which represent a girl’s promise to remain chaste until marriage. You can look up “True Love Waits” for more information on this subculture.

More than anything, it’s a way for a father to maintain control over his daughter’s body until his daughter marries, at which point the father passes that ownership over to her husband. In that way, the woman never truly has full control over her body or her sexuality. Everything is in the service of God, her father, or her husband.

It’s a kind of “eternal girlhood,” in which the girl never entirely takes care of her own life. She passes from her father’s household to that of her husband’s, and all decisions are made for her. She has no autonomy or ability to advocate for herself or her needs and wants. She’s raised to subjugate her needs and desires, first to her husband and then later to her husband and then her children.

It’s about keeping girls and women in a box and not allowing them to be themselves. They’re much more challenging to control when they’re allowed to be themselves…and once they get a taste of it, they’re not going back, knowhutimean?

My first thought when I started looking into this was that, in 2024, women and girls are still being valued more for the states of their vaginas than for their minds and their personhood. There are still those who believe that women and girls are commodities whose primary purpose is to serve men and produce and raise children.

It doesn’t matter what a woman wants from life, what her dreams and aspirations may be, or what she wants. No, the only thing that matters in “purity ball” culture is preserving the purity of women and girls to keep them from having sex before they marry.

Why is it so essential to control women? Why do men deem it so necessary that the female of the species be “pure” on her wedding night? How does a woman’s sexual history or experience change anything at all? More precisely, how is it anyone’s damned business?

However you might choose to look at it, “purity ball” culture is just about the creepiest shit ever.

What “purity ball” culture accomplishes is to keep women and girls from achieving their potential by keeping them in a state of perpetual girlhood and never allowing them ownership of their lives or their bodies. By keeping women and girls perpetually reliant first on their fathers and then on their husbands, they never learn how to care for themselves. Worse, they never learn how to achieve their potential and then determine and have an opportunity to pursue the life they want.

“Purity ball” culture reinforces that women are only and always the property of men, from birth to the end of their child-rearing years, when their utility has expired. In some cases, men never grow out of the mindset that women are property.

I’d appreciate it if someone would explain to me how “purity ball” culture differs from female slavery…explain it to me like I’m a fourth-grader. Because I genuinely don’t see the difference.

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