A field director for the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian organization, Mr. Wilson has promoted purity balls across the United States, and his Web site says they have been held in 48 states. He and his wife, Lisa, have written a book, and they sell a “purity ball packet” for $90.  Three of their five daughters also wrote a book, “Pure Woman.” One of those daughters, Jordyn Wilson Peppin, runs the Purely Woman School of Grace, a weeklong program where “ladies” can learn a godly path to “etiquette, grace and hosting.”  The media have lustily promoted the Wilsons. The family has been featured on Anderson Cooper’s television show, in magazines like Glamour, in many newspapers, including The New York Times, and in at least two documentaries: one, a Swiss production called “Virgin Tales,” was released this summer.  But there is something fishy about all this media attention.  Despite all the coverage of the Wilson family and their balls’ dramatic imagery — the girls doing ballet, placing roses before a cross, ballroom-dancing with their dads — there is little hard evidence that purity balls have spread much beyond Colorado Springs. And even some alumnae of Mr. Wilson’s dances express skepticism that they had much effect.  In her 2010 book “The Purity Myth,” the feminist writer Jessica Valenti, founder of the blog feministing.com, reported that “more than 1,400 purity balls” were held in 2006. Her footnote refers to a 2007 article by Jocelyne Zablit, who gives as the source of that figure Leslee J. Unruh, the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, in South Dakota. Reached by telephone this week, Ms. Unruh was rather more vague with her figures.  Her organization had 4,600 “inquiries” about purity balls in one recent 12-month period, Ms. Unruh said. The inquiries were “for purity ball planners that eventually went out, or that a staff person had a phone conversation with.”  Mr. Wilson said that he himself always doubted the figure of 1,400 purity balls a year, which he first heard in the news media. It was also reporters, he said, who gave him the figure he uses on his Web site.  “They reported them being held in 48 different states,” Mr. Wilson said.  Ms. Unruh said that however many balls actually occur, the idea has spread, and many chastity-promotion events now go by other names. There are “father-daughter balls,” and there are “Knights to Remember” dances, for mothers and sons.  And Ms. Unruh even counsels some organizers against calling their events purity balls.  “I tell them, ‘Use another name,’ ” Ms. Unruh said. “If you call it a purity ball, the media will want to come, then it’s not a private night for daughters and dads, it’s a fiasco. They want to follow the father, follow the daughter, take pictures of everyone getting dressed, and it ends up not being a night that is special.”  But there are other reasons organizers would shy away from the “purity ball” name.  Some may have become sensitive to the critique that the balls treat girls as property — that, as Ms. Valenti writes, “The message is clear and direct: It’s up to men to control young women’s sexuality.”  And in the name of protecting their sexuality, Ms. Valenti argues, the balls sexualize the girls. The event is often described as a “date.” And the attire can look uncomfortably pageantlike. “The girls — some as young as 6 or 7 — dress in ball gowns and often get their hair and makeup professionally done.”  Mr. Wilson said that whatever some of his imitators have done, his purity ball focuses on fathers, not daughters.  The father “is the one who signs a pledge that he will live a pure and moral life, which we believe impacts his sons and daughters,” Mr. Wilson said. “But for a daughter to agree to her father, that she will agree to purity — it puts an onus of guilt on the daughter if ever she goes and gets involved in a relationship outside of her father’s purview.”  But Caitlyn Carlson, who attended one of Mr. Wilson’s purity balls, found the old contract that her father had signed, and says that she was asked to sign it, too. “The language is for my father, but my signature is on the document, so it’s a recognition of what my dad signed,” she said.  In retrospect, Ms. Carlson, 25, does not believe the purity ball meant much.  “It was a chance to dress up and dance with my friends and hang out with my dad,” said Ms. Carlson, who works for a Christian publishing house. “But as far as a commitment to purity — that was not my reason for living out those beliefs about purity. It made the idea of purity a very black-and-white issue instead of a conversation about a healthy find-your-identity thing.”  But since returning to Colorado Springs after college, Ms. Carlson and her father have attended two Christian “father-daughter dances.”  “I had moved out of the house and was living on my own, so it was a chance for us to spend some intentional time together,” Ms. Carlson said.  Katelyn Statton, now an actress in California, attended two purity balls in Colorado Springs when she was 14 or 15.  “I think the reason why I attended two years in a row was just because it was a ‘father/daughter’ dance mostly in our minds,” Ms. Statton said in an e-mail. “During my teens, most of my friends were pastors’ kids and/or home-schooled, and like any other teen I wanted to be popular. In that group of people, things like purity balls were popular, so of course I wanted to be a part of it.”  In doing research for her book “Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns,” Christine J. Gardner, a professor at Wheaton College, intentionally excluded purity balls.  “They are not a hoax,” Dr. Gardner said in an interview, “but I wouldn’t call them a trend. Purity balls seem quirky and even creepy to the feminist outsider, but maybe it’s time to find a new scapegoat for our fears over sexual and religious conservatism.”
The father-daughter dance, created by a Family Research Council director in 1998, has drawn much news media coverage, but there is little evidence of a widespread trend.