RICHMOND, Va.—We've long suspected that the dads who bring their (often homeschooled) daughters to "purity balls" are a little wacky in a fundamentalist religious sort of way, as one might discern from the photos posted here, but the extremity of their sexual self-deception has rarely been more evident than in the fracas that took place last night at the Richmond Homeschool Prom.
It seems that 17-year-old Clare Ettinger, a non-fundie homeschooled girl from Chesterfield, Va., who's attending a local community college even as she's finishing her high school requirements, was ejected from her prom, which was taking place at the Shady Grove United Methodist Church, after several of the chaperoning dads accused her of supposedly "inciting impure thoughts" in some of the male attendees.
This being an adult website, we can't show any photos of the 17-year-old's face, but it's been plastered all over the news. We can note that she's a cute, sleek blonde sporting a swept-over hairstyle and bright red lipstick. For this evening she was wearing a shiny silver dress (pictured), which, in keeping with the prom rules, had a hemline that was "fingertip length or longer."
Clare's problems started as she entered the church with her (black) boyfriend, James Thompson. One of the matrons, a "Mrs. D," stopped her at the door, stating, "Honey, that dress is too short." However, when the long-legged Clare demonstrated that the hemline was indeed a couple of centimeters longer than Clare's extended fingertips, the couple was allowed to enter—after Mrs. D admonished, "Well, make sure it stays pulled down; it's too short."
"I just have long legs," Clare explained. "Everything looks short on me, but it is fingertip length; I just showed you."
"Okay," Mrs. D responded, "but you need to be careful and just keep pulling it down, but not too far!" (To which we have to ask, "Or what? Her tits will pop out the top?")
Anyway, Clare and James met up with their friends inside, and when Clare told them about Mrs. D, they all laughed, thinking it was pretty funny, especially since some of the shorter girls' dresses were even shorter than Clare's, though under the prom's standard, they were still longer than the fingertips of the shorter girls' arms—and that at previous years' proms, many of them had worn dresses shorter than were allowed this year.
But then things took a turn for the Freudian.
"We were also a little grossed out by all the dads on the balcony above the dance floor, ogling and talking amongst themselves," Clare wrote on her sister's blog. "We weren’t dancing, but swaying with the music and talking and enjoying ourselves, when Mrs. D again approached me, and gestured me off the dance floor. She took me into a corner in the hallway, with another woman, (who I’m assuming was a parent/chaperone) and told me that some of the dads who were chaperoning had complained that my dancing was too provocative, and that I was going to cause the young men at the prom to think impure thoughts."
O...M...G! "Impure thoughts"?!? What normal (hetero) 17-year-old boy doesn't have "impure thoughts"? A girl walks down the street with a low-cut tank top, and boys "think impure thoughts." A girl wears a sleeveless blouse so that when she turns sideways, her bra (or, if they're lucky, her actual tit) can be seen through the armhole ... and boys "think impure thoughts." Girls in bikinis play volleyball on the beach ... and boys "think impure thoughts." A girl bends over in school, so that her ass sticks up in the air ... and boys "think impure thoughts." In fact, there's pretty much nothing a teenage girl can do in the regular course of her life that teenage boys won't "think impure thoughts" about!
Of course, none of the boys attending the prom have yet come forward to admit that they were "thinking impure thoughts," so just exactly how did these chaperone dads figure out that they were? Or could it just be that the dads themselves were the ones thinking the "impure thoughts," and in a classic case of Freudian self-deception, they projected their own lusts onto the boys attending the prom?
That possibility apparently being too embarrassing to contemplate, Mrs. D again accused Clare of wearing a too-short dress, and again Clare showed her and another chaperone that it was fingertip length, but it made no difference: Clare was commanded to leave the prom.
Among the problems with the whole situation that Clare detailed in her blog post were:
• "I was told that the way I dressed and moved my body was causing men to think inappropriately about me, implying that it is my responsibility to control other people’s thoughts and drives...
• "I felt violated by the sheer number of male parents that were assigned to do nothing for five hours other then watch girls in short dresses and heels dance to upbeat music. I think that it is sick and wrong that they assigned them to sit on a balcony above us and look down on us and single us out for our clothes or dancing.
• "I never signed any documentation agreeing to adhere to any sort of dress code, and the dress code that was verbally communicated to me was followed to the letter, and yet I was still kicked out.
• "I was informed by more then one friend who stayed at the prom throughout the course of the evening that there was some truly dirty dancing, and that there were several couples making out and grinding on the dance floor, and yet out of a group of 500 people, only one person (me) got thrown out for inappropriate dancing."
But what this whole situation should say to the adult entertainment community (and beyond) is that so-called "impurity" (whatever that may mean when it comes to sexuality—or lack of it) is in the mind of the beholder, and while this little fracas is unlikely to have any major negative effects on the future lives of Clare and her friends, it's the very concept of "impure thoughts" that has been codified in the law as "obscenity"—and people who are charged with that have had (and will have) beaucoup negative effects on their future lives, to the tune of an incredibly expensive trial and possibly five or ten years in the federal slammer.
And all because some chaperone's (or judge's) dick got hard because he found an image he wasn't supposed to enjoy exciting. And that's the long and the short of all laws regarding "obscenity."
