Activation

Contemplation is good. My first thought was love.

Chastity.

Which then requires two additional avenues of thought:

(1) What does chastity really mean?
(2) How does the chart inform a more general virtue of temperance. I am thinking specifically of the tension between temperance and gluttony. Particularly (as this addresses my own vice of choice) in food matters.

Alternatively, the upper right virtue could be recharacterized as marital fidelity, and the lower left virtue as abstinence. Same questions follow, but this recognizes that the two prongs of chastity are being explored, instead of placing chastity in tension with marital relations.

I keep thinking of something like “Bond-trust” Or “Bond surety”.
Frigidity is a false and vindictive version of “we are not intimate NOW, but we are still bonded.”
Lewdness is a public flouting of a trusting intimate bond, giving or receiving the tokens of that bond in a promiscuous way, violating the trust aspect.

@N Do you mean ‘Marital Faithfulness’? That seems to fit perfectly.

Ya, I’m inclined to go with law of chastity, except that should ideally be aggregated with marriage in the top right.

You want a virtuous counter point to sex in the way frigidity is the abnormal counter to pornography.
Celibacy would seem to be it.

“Sexual Temperance” includes both marital chastity and fidelity: sexual passion disciplined to get the right amount in the right place, that is, channeled toward the right end.

Perhaps what is in the upper left corner has not been framed in terms of a vice, more like corrupting temptations that are the environmental pollution of spiritual poison of a sinful society. To succumb to lust agitated in the wrong direction is to indulge in aselgeia.

“Continence.”

Dang it Books, you beat me to it! : )

I would have said all of these (temperance, faithfulness, continence) are aspects of Chastity or Virtue, properly understood. The virtue in the lower left should be Chastity, the kind that means abstinence for the Single and joyful Fidelity for the Married.

An aspect to all the above that I will add is that there is also a proper role for sexual attraction outside of marriage. Long ago as a member of a Teachers’ Quorum, I recall listening to a filmstrip about such things with Elder Boyd Packer narrating, and the thing he said that stuck with me was it is good that men are attracted to women; otherwise they would wander the earth seeking adventure, never marrying and having children.

It was a dozen years ago riding on a bus that I noticed a young woman wearing an Muslim head covering. I considered the loss for men in countries were that is the custom that they never enjoy the beauty of a woman’s hair except for their own wives’, and young unmarried men don’t even have that private pleasure. Plenty of people, though, would say the same the thing touching far more of women’s beauty than just the viewing of their hair.

There are perversions of the right course of men being wholesomely attracted to women. There is that Arab concept that a woman displaying the hair of her head has wantonly exposed herself, and the lusty viewer may as well assault the already defiled woman. There are the idiots that chime in that displays of nudity and such are just fine, the spoken argument being that finding certain things provocative is unsophisticated and we ought to be above all that, but the real belief probably being that it is fun to be intensely, carnally attracted to various random people.

Continence for me.

(In a couple of different senses.)

Thank you to our host for a most intriguing thought experiment! I’ve been mulling this over all day while I worked, and it’s been a pleasure.

Perhaps the virtue is not merely the appetite at rest, but at rest while one is observing beauty. Pornography and other worldly sexualizations add sexual activation where it is not appropriate, while frigidity removes it from where it belongs. I am thinking with my fingers here; please forgive me if I ramble. There are many women I have seen (this mollusc is male) to whom I am not at all physically attracted, but whose aesthetic beauty is undeniable. For that matter, there are numerous men I would put in a similar category! To look on a person to admire his beauty in a purely intellectual or spiritual fashion, without any bodily appetites involved. So, by this reasoning, the unnamed virtue might be called something like “admiration”.

I would agree with ‘Continence’. I think the chart as a whole is about the role of sexuality in relationships. A marriage entered purely for sex is little better than simply forgoing the marriage and going straight to the sex, but a marriage without sex seems to miss a fundamental point of the whole thing.

I also think ‘Marital Activation’ doesn’t quite capture it. The idea is that Marital Relations are inherently joyful, and it is that joy that is distorted/contradicted.