My dear wife often mentions how dogs are "food motivated". She can get our dog to quit barking at other dogs, to come in when she calls, or raise a paw in a gesture of shaking hands - for a dog treat. Many men of the two-legged variety could be called "sex-motivated". (Surprise, surprise as Gomer would say). This can turn sex into a bargaining chip.
I appreciate Pope John Paul II's thoughts on love and sexual love, even if they seem a bit ethereal. Love-making, the mutual physical expression of wedded love, can look different closer to the ground. At our annual golf outing, one of the guys mentioned how 'quid-pro-quo' sex has become. You want sex? Okay, you have to do (fill in the blank). Sex can become a sort of currency, the equivalent of cigarettes in prison. Fortunately, and thank God, my wife does not look at it this way although the temptation is there given that many of her women friends do.
It is understandable that any time one party has a greater need or desire for something it puts the other party in a position of power. But power is obviously not what relationships are all about even if the world says it is. It also isn't what the Church is about - I'll quote Ratzinger:
There is an ideology that fundamentally traces all existing institutions back to power politics. And this ideology corrupts humanity and also destroys the Church. Here is a concrete example: If I see the Church only under the aspect of power, then it follows that everyone who doesn't hold an office is oppressed. And then the question of, for example, women's ordination, as an issue of power, becomes imperative. I think this ideology produces a totally false point of view, as if power were the only category for explaining the world and the communion present in it. If belonging to the Church has any meaning at all, then the meaning can only be that it gives us eternal life. We are not in the Church in order to exercise power as if in some kind of association.
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