Yet, we often don't understand or appreciate the centrality of this virtue in human relationships because people restrict chastity to the morality of sexual expression. Certainly, chastity is one moral gauge used to indicate what is appropriate sexual behavior. But, in exclusively linking chastity to this one part of life, we have allowed it to fall out of vogue. Leaders in the more radical sections of the woman's movement sneer at chastity as a form of Victorian prudishness or of masculine control over women. Such misguided reactions have robbed us of our human nobility and kept an entire generation in an arrested stage of psycho-sexual development.
Chastity is a multidimensional virtue.
Chastity provides a unique window through which to view our world, other people, and ourselves. A person who strives to live chastely, whether married, single, or celibate, is conscious of trying to approach every aspect of life without covetousness, domination, grasping, or groping. There is no room for greed and exploitation when one lives chastely, because chastity consists in the long-term integration of one's thoughts, feelings, and actions in a way that values, esteems, and respects the dignity of the created order, others, and oneself. As applied to human relationships, chastity frees us from the tendency to act in manipulative or selfish manners. It enables us to understand a person's state in life and to offer a fitting response of love for that person.