A banner at Soldier Field in Chicago summarized the incident that made the Minnesota Vikings, in the words of the New York Times, "a national joke." It read "Sink the Vikings But Save The Strippers." The reference, in case you don't read the sports pages or watch ESPN, was to an Oct. 6 party/cruise on Lake Minnetonka that, to put it mildly, got out of control.

The fallout from this party sees players being investigated by law enforcement officials, an already-shaky coach this- much-closer to losing his job and a long sought after stadium deal in jeopardy. And that's before the National Football League weighs in. It also gives us a glimpse of our impoverished ideas about what it means to be a man.

According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Vikings players rented two yachts from a charter company. Like the passengers on the SS Minnow, the Vikes and their guests were expecting a three-hour tour. Instead, they got 40 minutes. Employees knew something was wrong as soon as they got onboard: they saw women in various states of undress walking around the boat. From there, the cruise quickly turned into a "wild sex party." Not content with their already gross misconduct, players allegedly offered female employees money for sex. When they called their boss and told him that they feared for their safety, he ordered the yachts to turn around.

Both the Hennepin County Sheriff's office and the Vikings are investigating what happened on Oct. 6. Players could face criminal charges, and, of course, there will be lawsuits arising from their conduct. But the worst fallout will probably be the public relations hit. As the Times put it, "[T]he incident is the latest in a series of bungles and brushes with the law that have embarrassed the Vikings organization and jeopardized new owner Zygi Wilf's chances of getting approval for his proposed stadium development plan in suburban Anoka County."

While nobody that I'm aware of has defended what happened on that cruise, several sportswriters have attempted to put events of Oct. 6 into "perspective." Dan Le Batard of the Miami Herald said that what team and league officials are "mad about here isn't that these guys did this; it's that they got caught." Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post went even further and added that stuff like this not only goes on "in every sport," it also happens with "rich guys out of sports, bankers, people with tons of money...."

I don't know about "rich guys out of sports," but Wilbon and Le Batard seem to be right about athletes: it's a rare thing when you read about some professional athlete getting into trouble and don't see the words "strip club" in the same paragraph. And then, as with the Vikings, the scandal isn't over their being at a strip club or hiring a prostitute but, rather, over some ancillary offense.

Talk about your "soft bigotry of low expectations"! The message seems to be that "it's okay to be a sexually irresponsible boor as long you don't actually violate the penal code in the process." In the case of athletes, the soft bigotry is reinforced by the fact that we've come to regard them as literally embodying everything that is distinctly male. Their exploits both on the field and off it — including their treatment of women — are seen as a kind of elemental masculinity.

While there are qualities and attributes that define manhood, they have little, if anything, to do with physical prowess or the urge to dominate others. These qualities and attributes can be found within the word "virtue."

I mean that literally. The word "virtue" comes from the Latin virtus, which in turn is derived from vir, the Latin word for "man" or "husband." To the Romans, virtus, which can also be translated as "manliness," included those character traits they prized most highly: courage, strength, and bearing up under adversity.

It was Cicero, nearly a century before the advent of the Christian era, who enumerated what came to be known as the "cardinal" — from cardes, the Latin word for "hinge" — virtues: justice, giving each person his due; prudence, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong in a given situation; courage, the capacity to face danger and endure hardship; and, temperance, self-control over one's appetites and drives.

While virtus expanded beyond its largely martial origins, it remained the standard against which men, whatever their station in life, were expected to measure themselves. Honor, which was the quality to which all decent Roman men aspired, consisted in knowing and acting in accordance with these virtues. (Actually, for Cicero, these four were all parts of virtus with a capital "v.")

Rome's failure to live up to this ideal, which greatly contributed to its demise, doesn't change the fact that for much of the history of Western Civilization, the door to true manhood swung open and closed on the hinges of virtue. After the collapse of the Empire, Christianity kept this ideal of virtue alive. It added what are called the "theological virtues" of faith, hope and love to Antiquity's list of virtues that men should measure themselves against.

Over time, virtue ceased being the measure of true manliness. Instead, in an ironic reversal, it became feminized: virtue came to describe a woman's sexual conduct. While the reasons for this reversal are the stuff of at least several books, it's not hard to describe the results of this divorce of "manliness" from virtue: a reductionist-to-the-point-of-caricature understanding of what it means to be a man.

The real differences between men and women were reduced to the obvious physical ones — musculature and physical prowess — and ersatz-Darwinist ideas about the inexorability of male promiscuity. (I said "ersatz" because our genetic history suggests that the myth about men spreading their seed, and, with it, their genetic patrimony, hither and yon is just that: a myth and a rationalization for contemporary male promiscuity. If anything men, for a myriad of reasons, have stayed closer to home than their sisters.) In yet another reversal, masculinity ceased being about character and moral excellence and became identified as a kind of atavism: what men, freed from the inhibitions imposed by Christianity and the civilization it helped create, would do "naturally."

This idea, albeit in an extreme form, was on display in what allegedly happened Oct. 6 on Lake Minnetonka. Setting aside — for a moment — the issues of the venue and possible injury to innocent bystanders, many people regard the players actions as a case of "boys will be boys" and the kind of thing that most men would do if they had the players' resources.

It's difficult to imagine a better illustration of the crisis confronting the American male. What does virility (note the prefix) mean in a culture that is, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it, "After Virtue"? What does it mean to have the "nature, properties, or qualities of an adult male" in a time when being a husband and father — the venues in which most men have practiced virtue — is, if not entirely optional, less important?

The last few decades have seen many different answers to these questions, from the "sensitive male" to banging drums in the woods to men slugging each other silly in somebody's basement ("The First Rule of Fight Club is ...").

Yet the crisis continues. Virility has become, at "best," a synonym for machismo — the Spanish word for an exaggerated and insecure masculinity — and, at worst, as is the case in many dictionaries, a word whose primary meaning has to do with a male's ability to copulate.

The results are not only the kind of wrongdoing that made the Vikings a "national joke" but an increasing inability to call what was done "wrong." Part of us knows (as J. Budziszewski might put it, we cannot not know) that the players' actions would have been disgraceful even if there had been no employees onboard but our confusion about what it means to be a man leaves us with little recourse besides the blunt language and categories of the law. An appeal to virtue would not only be unpopular, it would be incomprehensible.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. A few years ago, the "Promise Keepers" movement looked to be on the way to reviving the link between virtue and manliness, at least among Christians. While that didn't happen, the organization's essential insight, that true manhood is best found by being the best husband, father and friend we can be, is still true. The door to real manliness is, more often than not, the front door to our homes.