Happy Fall Break!

Have you heard of the Purity Movement?  I hadn't.  Nor had I heard about Purity Balls.  Apparently they are pretty common in the US though.  I watched a documentary on it last night.  It was weird.

Now I'm not saying saving yourself til marriage (even first kiss til marriage, though that is just completely weird to me) is bad.  It is your choice when you want to become intimate with another person.  But these little girls and teenage girls that were interviewed seemed like they were bullied into it by their parents.  They have to sign contracts, too.  It was just kind of scary to me.  And it reinforced the whole partriarchal ideology - females are nothing without males.  The girls have to have their father until they have a husband, without that, they cannot function right in society or for God.  I just ... hmm.  I hate getting into religious debates, but I just wish that these girls know that they are a complete and wonderful human being on their own.  One girl in the documentary was interviewed who had grown up in the purity movement, signed the covenant contract, but then decided to have sex when she was 19 and before she got married.  She even said as a result of her upbringing and not knowing about sex, it played a part in her getting pregnant.  She wasn't exposed to birth control methods because she was told to wait until she got married to even kiss a boy.  Abstinence only sex education is stupid.  Marrying someone, when you're only teenagers especially, only because you got pregnant is stupid - what kind of home life is that to bring a baby into when they parents are scared and only with each other because of the baby.

If you're going to have sex, make it your own decision and nobody else's.  I know girls that have waited until marriage, ones that say they will but then don't and try and pretend like they did, and ones that are completely comfortable with having sex way before they get married.  It's up to them how they decide to handle it.  I wish that someday soon we could talk about sex openly.  It's presented to us everywhere in the media but God forbid a girl ask her parents about it or get a condom from school.  This is just one aspect that America needs to step up their game with ... among all the others.  Our puritanical nation is just falling behind the way it is going when we have the potential to be the best in the world.

Annnnnnd now I'm going to go to the last of my birfday celebrations with my two best friends that are 10 and 20 years older than me.  peaceeeeeeeeee.