Our friends have had a lot of wisdom from the springboard of President Oaks recent remarks and the mission-age change for our maidens.

It’s made me think of a virtue set.

For the uninitiated, many virtues and vices or even generally good and bad things seem to fall into a natural pattern of opposites.  Chastity and sexual immorality, for example.  But also many vices seem to be twisted versions of virtues instead of being their opposites.  In fact, it turns out that virtues usually have two vices–an opposite vice and a twisted vice–one vice that is the contrary of the virtue and one vice that is a distorted or misapplied version of the virtue.  But even more amazing, it turns out that the opposite vice is the twisted vice of another virtue and the twisted vice is the opposite vice of that same other virtue.  This is really an astounding fact about the world.

Here’s a typical virtue set

If this interests you, we have done a lot of exploration of this concept and of specific virtue sets under the tag ‘virtue chart‘ or you can just search for virtue chart or virtue set in the search bar.

One of the most useful things about the virtue set is is constantly reveals overlooked virtues and vices, some of which we don’t even have a name for (example here).  Usually those overlooked virtues and vices correspond to real weaknesses in our culture and its fascinating and wonderful to discover them.    Sexual morality is no exception.

Here’s the set:

Virility is not a common word, and even when people know what it means they don’t usually think of it as a virtue.  It is the overlooked element in this virtue set.  Coincidentally, we seem to suffer from a lack of virility right now.

But discovering virility is not the most amazing discovery about this set.  The most amazing discovery for me is that we lack a term or even a concept for healthy female sexuality at all.  Virility is the virtue of male sexuality.  What is the equivalent for women?  Our culture doesn’t know, is unable to think or even categorize it, and that explains a lot.