If a girl today wants to hang on to her virginity, that’s fine. And if she wants to go to a bash to celebrate it (even if the ball is thrown by evangelicals), that’s fine, too. But this is clearly a party she needs to go to alone — or at least not on a date with Daddy. That’s a little creepy to me …

A Purity Ball??!! Is WHAT exactly?? Is it like a cotton ball? A hair ball? A nerf ball? Is it a Mormon keepsake? Why does everyone know this reference but me?

I’m afraid I think they’re ridiculous.

Never caught one. Lousy at games.

Well, again, like Marlo, I think this is entirely creepy. You dress up in an evening gown and have a DATE with your father to promote abstinence? And your father makes a vow to protect your virginity in front of all the other folks in black tie and evening gowns? (How exactly does that work?) And then the next time this happens, everybody is dressed the same and he is giving your pristine self away to your husband? Whew.

I know I am the one who said in my post about Sarah Palin that there is a lot about the "flyover states," what I call regular America, that we in the media don’t often understand and this is proof of that.

I myself would have preferred the usual awkward father-daughter chat, but, thankfully, I was spared even that, because I think my father would have had a heart attack and died before he had gotten through it. My father and I are still very close and when I was a kid he dragged me (happily) around the country with him, mostly to Washington, where I got very friendly with the Filipino waiter at the Hay-Adams bar. He would make me grasshoppers when I was, like, 12 and give me peanuts to feed the squirrels in Lafayette Square across the street, and I thought this was a pretty wholesome way to spend time myself. But I don’t think the dads who are giving purity balls in places like the ballroom at the Broadmoor in Colorado would approve (clearly, I have now Googled purity ball).

My father always treated me like a smart, relatively grown-up person he liked a lot and respected, and while this did not exactly promote abstinence (and certainly not abstinence until I married, which did not happen until I was 42!), I think it made me trust myself. As I got older, even when I made some doozies of mistakes, I always knew I’d be OK somehow. Not long ago, my father called me and said, "I got some advice for you," and then we both started laughing, because we realized he has never actually given me any. He hasn’t had to.

Once we did go to a ball together though. I was 13 and a page at the Delta Debutante Ball, a ludicrous organization and event that was once emceed by a local doctor who said the debs had finally "attained social attainment in the eyes of the Lord." You can’t make this stuff up. Anyway, I had on this awful white lace dress with a Bertha collar (the most unflattering look in the world) that we all had to wear, and I was carrying a bouquet of pink and white roses, and the photographer, whose name I will never forget (Arthur David Greenberg all the way from Manhattan) had us pose under these birdcages that were hanging from the country club ceiling and contained dyed hot pink parakeets. Daddy thought that was the funniest thing in the world and there we were standing under these poor birds cracking up at the sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing.

As soon as the presentation was over, all the grown people danced and drank copious amounts of Scotch and gin and my fellow pages drank all the champagne we could get our hands on, which was a lot, and lusted after the older boys escorting the actual debutantes who seemed so much more glamorous than we. I think it was already too late to protect my purity. When it was my turn to be a deb, I politely declined, since I had already, as it were, "come out," and I thought I would be a tad redundant. So then I got this call in my college dorm room from my father, and he said, "Baby, you sure you don’t want to come back and stand underneath those birds again?" and I laughed and said I’d be happy to go find some dyed birds we could stand under and get our picture taken. That is pretty much how our conversations go, which I find far more suitable than any discussion about him protecting my virginity in mind, body and soul.