How Chastity Builds True Masculinity
And why the world makes it so hard to pursue this virtue.
What Chastity Is (and Isn’t)
The virtue of chastity is widely misunderstood to mean mere abstinence from sexual activity, when in reality, chastity means the right ordering of love and sexual desire.
The Magisterium defines it as:
Chastity, simply put, is the virtue of sexual restraint and self-control, and the mastery over our sexual impulses, to order them properly, and to integrate them into faith and reason, instead of letting them control us.
Of course, for people who are not married, that means abstaining from sexual activity, because there’s a right context to enjoy the pleasures of our sexuality, and that is exclusively in marriage. Sexual desire isn’t bad in and of itself, but it’s bad when it’s not properly controlled and directed. Similarly to how the appetite for food isn’t bad in and of itself, but can easily degenerate into gluttony. For each pleasure, there’s a right context in which it should be enjoyed. In the case of sex, the right context is in a marriage between a man and a woman, sealed sacramentally through the covenant of marriage before God.
But even within marriage chastity remains important. In marriage, the virtue of chastity ceases to be so much about abstinence and becomes more about reason and respect for one’s spouse. Chastity is a virtue that ought to be practiced throughout our entire lives, but the way it should be practiced changes according to your specific state in life.
Many critics of chastity make the —false— claim that abstaining leads to repressed desires which end up causing psychological issues, but as C.S. Lewis explains, this is a misunderstanding of repressions:
Thirdly, people often misunderstand what psychology teaches about "repressions." It teaches us that "repressed" sex is dangerous. But "repressed" is here a technical term: it does not mean "suppressed" in the sense of "denied" or "resisted."
A repressed desire or thought is one which has been thrust into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can now come before the mind only in a disguised and unrecognisable form. Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all.
When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression.
On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a ratcatcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes.
Virtue —even attempted virtue— brings light; indulgence brings fog.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Chastity, then, is always a virtue, regardless of whether you’re single, married, young or old. The right ordering of sexual impulses is always better than being enslaved by the temptations of your flesh.
Chastity as Self-Mastery
The laws of God are not here to enslave us, but rather to set us free. It’s amazing how atheists and agnostics alike make the claim that religion is mere slavery to arbitrary rules, when in reality it’s the complete opposite: it’s the voluntary adherence to meaningful, just rules, which set you free from the slavery of your own flesh, passions, feelings, and lower tendencies.
Ask yourself who’s more free: The guy who chooses to abstain from sexual activity because it’s the right thing to do, or the guy who compulsively follows the desires of his flesh, without being able to control them?
Chastity, in this sense, is incredibly meaningful because it teaches the ultimate form of self-control: the sexual drive is one of the most powerful, which means that controlling it requires a strong degree of mental fortitude and mastery over yourself.
He who conquers himself is greater than he who conquers a city.
— Proverbs 16:32
Even more so because nowadays the world promotes sexual immorality at every step of the way:
You get exposed to pornography when you’re barely a teen.
Secular “scientists” claim that porn, masturbation, and casual sex are harmless.
You open any social media app and get flooded by images that you would only have seen in Playboy magazines back in the day.
All movies and TV shows contain suggestive or outright explicitly sexual content.
Everyone talks about sex liberally and vulgarly.
Even some of the girls from your school or college have onlyfans and sell themselves for money.
Having a high body count is seen as a status symbol.
These are just a few of the reasons why being chaste is so difficult nowadays.
Chastity is one of the most difficult virtues to build because it requires you to fight constantly against modern programing and the influences of a world that has elevated sex to the point where it has become the main purpose in the life of most men.
But that’s what makes this virtue so valuable. If you can muster the strength, through God’s grace and with His constant help, to reject all these influences and free yourself from the temptations of sexual immorality, you will build an uncommon level of self-control, one that will translate into all other areas of your life.
How Chastity Builds Masculinity
1) Chastity Strengthens All Other Virtues:
Self-control in regards to sexuality translates to self-control in all other areas of your life. By choosing to live a chaste life, you will naturally build:
Temperance, as you learn to keep your emotions and passions under control.
Patience, as you learn to wait until you find the right woman and commit to her in marriage.
Courage, as you learn to swim against the current of the mainstream world and to choose what’s right and good even when everyone around you is choosing otherwise.
Humility, as you realize you won’t be able to free yourself from sin on your own and need God’s grace to do it.
Charity, as you understand that by being chaste you’re not just protecting your purity but the purity of all the women you would like to sleep with for selfish reasons but choose not to.
Discipline, as you start to develop habits that strengthen your resolve and power of will.
All of these virtues are essential for masculinity, and by committing to chastity you’ll develop all of them simultaneously, becoming a man of honor and self-control.
2) It Teaches You To Love Righteously
Because of the aforementioned influences of the modern world, many of us have subconsciously internalized a selfish, prideful, narcissistic kind of love: we believe it’s all about us, and it doesn’t matter who we hurt as long as we get to satisfy our desires.
Slowly, bit by bit, as we let ourselves become more and more consumed by the oversexualized secular world, we forget that love is supposed to be selfless, and the ultimate act of giving. It’s the ultimate form of sacrifice: we deny ourselves for the good of the other.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
Chastity is the way to clean our mind and soul from the influences of modernity and remember once again how love truly is: selfless, sacrificial, honest, kind, and patient. By choosing chastity we are choosing to believe in love again, the kind of love that God shows us, the kind of love that a husband should offer his spouse, and not the perversions of fake love brought about by transactional sex, by the false promises of a world that tells you it’s all about you, that as long as you satisfy your urge nothing else matters, and that love and sex have nothing to do with one another.
Chastity teaches you to protect your partner. You are protecting them from yourself. Because you, and I, and everyone else is flawed, and the rules set forth by God are there so we can avoid harming others, which is what would happen if we listened to our urges instead of listening to His commands.
It teaches you to respect them and their purity, to see women as daughters of God, instead of instruments to use and abuse for your own pleasure. Do not underestimate how selfish and narcissistic it is to go around destroying the chastity of very often broken, wounded women who desperately long for someone to love them.
Chastity purifies love.
Conclusion
Pursuing chastity is not just an arbitrary “religious rule” — it’s the training ground for becoming excellent in all areas of life. It’s choosing the hardest thing of all: learnign the ultimate form of self-control.
It’s choosing to deny yourself and follow God. It’s choosing to see yourself and others as much more than just animals, as children of God, created in His image, for a specific purpose.
It’s choosing to purify your desires and intentions, and selflessly choose to love as God intended, by truly, and honestly desiring the good of all others.
It’s choosing to be an uncommon man, a man of mastery and self-control, at a time when most live consumed by their passions.
It’s ordering your childish, disordered desires and orienting them towards all that’s good and pure.
Choosing chastity is choosing to become a real man.
Like a city breached, without walls,
is one who lacks self-control.
— Proverbs 25:28
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Amazing article!
Not a big fan of how the term “partner” is being thrown around these days.
It carries a corporate, rule-of-law connotation to it.
Using Husband and wife instead is best.
Great article brother!