Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball

Madame Mao may be old but she’s still a woman and it was with some heartbreak that I found that I had been refused entry to the Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball.

These events take place all across the United States and fathers and daughters dress up in full evening wear and exchange rings in a weird wedding style ceremony to symbolise the fact that the father is prepared to go to ‘war’ to protect his girls virginity until marriage.

As someone who in an esoteric sense has already married her father, Chairman Mao father of all the people, this whole concept had a haunting resonance for me.

Perhaps, however, I’d feel a little out of place as a 92 year old as the majority of the girls at spending time with the old man are, as Purity Ball guidelines suggest, “just old enough to have begun menstruating”.

Some fathers even bring girls under 10 and it’s not unheard of for four year olds to turn up on their dad’s arm in a floor length gown. All of them in the end sign a purity covenant with the Lord.

I suggested with the organisers that I was being discriminated on political grounds because as a good communist during the revolution I had systematically hunted down christian priests and landlords, tied them to poles in the middle of village squares and encouraged the mob to beat them to death with farm tools.

It turns out, however, that in the end none of the dad’s would have been interested in my baggy old grey fanny.