Daddy's little uterus

There are likely few girls out there who grew up without daddy issues of some sort. Maybe he was around, maybe he was the greatest dad when you were little, maybe you're both now adults and best friends - but there seems to be that inevitable pause when you start to turn from adorable little pumpkin into actual woman where - as Angela Chase put it so succinctly - "My breasts had come between us."

Daughters and fathers in a patriarchal society are bound to have tense relationships, especially when it comes to sexuality. That "fatherly" need to protect one's female offspring from the horrors of consensual, pre-marital sex (thereby devaluing her future as a saleable commodity to another man) is best exemplified in these bizarre "Purity Balls" which are apparently very popular in the fundamentalist Christian community. There's an excellent post (with accompanying photo of a VERY young girl pledging her purity to her father, probably thinking how nice it is that everyone thinks she's such a purty little girl) describing just how weird and twisted the whole thing is.

My question is, where are the mother/son purity balls? Or the mother/daughter? Or the father/son? Oh, silly me, it's only women and little girls who need help protecting their "purity". So it's up to dad to "protect" and "be an authority" and "keep the seal intact until purchase" and so on. Can't let those mothers do that, because they're not pure. I mean sure, they had sex for procreation, which isn't a sin, technically, but they're still "impure", and, furthermore, they might have enjoyed it, so we can't trust them. Although I can't imagine any man who takes his 4-year-old daughter to such an Electra-complex-creating event is of much use in the sack.

And it's not just anecdotal, skeeves-you-right-out evidence that shows that girls understand daddy's judging their sexuality - here's an excerpt from a study published in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality that examined perceived parental disapproval as a factor in teens' sexual behavior:

Females were significantly more likely than males to anticipate fathers’ disapproval but the sexes did not differ with respect to mothers’ disapproval.

I don't want to paint all fathers with the same brush, 'cause there are awesome dads out there (and terrible moms too). Genitals don't make you a good or bad parent, any more than they make you a good or bad person. But it's so, so sad that there aremen out there who see their primary fatherly duty to keep their daughter a virgin until she can be given away to her husband. If you think sex makes your daughter "damaged goods", if you think a man who'd reject a woman for marriage because she's committed the unforgivable sin of sexual activity is a man to whom you want your daughter to be legally bound, then you probably think that a woman's only purpose in life is making babies and sandwiches, and the world will never know what your daughter could accomplish with her life, all because of your utero-fixation.