That “Integrity Balls,” the male counterpart to daddy/daughter “Purity Balls,” are intended to extract vows from boys to preserve women’s chastity instead of their own is just… I dunno, it goes against all but maybe the first 100 and the last 100 years of Christianity’s tradition with chastity. From St. Anthony and the early Church Fathers of Scetis, Egypt to the American Harvey Kellogg and Muscular Christianity, men’s chastity has been at least as important as women’s and often far, far, far more so.

Yes, the older world order was no more respectful of women — until maybe the 1700’s they were considered utterly immoral and therefore willing to copulate, at the drop of the hat, with any man too weak-willed to resist their wiles (if their families somehow left them unchaperoned.) And yes, the latter-day fantasies of Dr. Graham (of Graham crackers) and Dr. Kellogg (of Kellogg’s corn flakes) that a single ejaculation was equivalent of losing a pint of blood were beyond mentally ill.

But the fact remains that until very recently indeed chastity (as opposed to pre-marital virginity) was primarily the domain of men.

And therefore the fact that modern-day chastity movements has so completely detached itself from male chastity is just depraved.

Humorous side note #1: ‘Member in the movie Dr. Strangelove where the suicidal Gen. Jack D. Ripper goes off on a screed about the need to protect men’s “precious bodily fluids?” While it seemed bizarre by the 1960s, when the movie was made, and sounds utterly daft today, it was routine medical advice in the 1890s when it was believed, for instance, that excessive “conjugal endeavors with one’s spouse” — say a “depraved” 12 times a year — meant certain insanity and death.

Humorous side note #2: Westerners aren’t the only ones to believe in “semen conservation.” For instance it’s one of the foundations of Hinduism. (It’s also pretty central to Taoism, Buddhism, and a number of South American shamanistic principles. Withholding ejaculation was a huge motivation behind the development of Tantric sex.) Anyway, in the Ayurvedic medical tradition of India loss of semen through ejaculation is also a big health risk for men. And now that women are allegedly ejaculating it seems they too are now at risk. According to the Llewellyn Journal, in an article about women and tantra, “...we are aware of one contemporary neo-Tantric teacher who claims that female ejaculation causes cervical cancer…”