Chastity; an objective virtue?

21st century western mores promote sexual freedom. Lust is no longer a sin, chastity no virtue. Prudentius pointed out the contrary nature of chastity and lust over 1500 years ago in his epic poem Psychomachia.

Paternal certainty was an important motivation in the development of western civilisation and pre-marital chastity was one of women's primary contributions to this. Dr Amneus sets this out cogently at: www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Library/Amneus/garbage/

Chastity's virtue was and is widely recognised across cultures, e.g. "In the 1930s [a cross-generational mating study found that] men valued chastity as close to indispensable" (Buss 1994, p67). Going deeper into the anthropological reasons for this, and paraphrasing Buss: "Concealed ovulation gave ancestral men a unique paternal certainty problem... Marriage provided one solution... Fidelity was enforced by family members... A man who did not obtain a chaste mate risked becoming involved with a woman who would cuckold him... Men who were indifferent to the potential sexual contact of their partners would not have been successful at passing on their genes."

In other words there are good reasons to suppose that men instinctively value chastity because those that didn't simply didn't get to pass on their indifferent gene so reliably.

The bottom line, though, is what works. If chastity is an essential component of motivating men's commitment to developing a society - and if a society developed in this way is more successful at maintaining and growing itself than another that doesn't value chastity - then chastity is an objective virtue, whatever 20th century feminists would prefer to believe.

I happen to suspect this might be the case - despite the awkward implications to the satisfaction of my own lust.

Not a popular view, I know. But then I'm not convinced popularity is an objective virtue!