Pleasure sought for itself, or rather more accurately, an activity done solely to acquire pleasure for one’s self, can be a bad thing. There’s the element of selfishness, and the blindness to a higher good than mere pleasure. Now, we are making silly comparisons here. No one would begrudge someone a coke for the great belch and pleasing tingle it put’s up your nose.
A coke is an inanimate object, a human being is a human being, not because I say so, but because God created them. To use another human being solely for one’s own pleasure is evil, it is objectification, or appropriating for one’s own pleasure a person who belongs first to God, and has a dignity that must be respected. This applies to not only the spouse in front of us, but also to images we appropriate through pornography or ogling on the street.
**The hard part here is, this principle does not preclude pleasure from the act of sex, rather enhances it. **This is where people get confused and the reason we are having a dispute about this issue. It can be a hard concept to grasp, because pleasure is a powerful motivator. A chaste life (not the same as celibate) is not a life of drudgery,it is a life of properly ordered peace, joy, pleasure, and can be every bit as spontaneous once the virtue of purity is mastered. (The virtue of purity is not the same as celibacy either.)
People get these concepts confused.
