Is Sex a Gateway to Sin?

The Gates of Hell by Rodin - is this where sex ed leads us?

According to recent legal activities in Tennessee, and an advocacy group opposed to Planned Parenthood, sexual activity of any kind can serve as a dangerous “gateway” that introduces dangerous ideas to the young and innocent (I work with teens, and there’s not a whole lot of innocents out there, to tell you the truth, so I’m not real sure who we’re protecting).

In drug prevention, there is the concept of “gateway drugs,” that is, that certain drugs, notably marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol, serve as an entry point for drug use. The theory goes that since marijuana is perceived as a relatively low-risk drug, people start using it, but they find themselves on a slippery slope of increasing drug use as their marijuana habit expands to include other more dangerous drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD, and so forth. The gateway drug hypothesis is a popular one with prevention efforts, encouraging the ideas that it’s best just to not start at all. In sexual addiction, the concept is applied liberally to consumption of pornography, and even to participation in various kinds of nontraditional sexual behaviors. “Once you start, you won’t be able to stop,” goes the theory.

However, the science of the gateway theory is marginal at best. More and more studies are showing that drug use has far more to do with social, biological, and environmental factors. The drugs people choose to use as they first begin using them has more to do with what is easily and readily available to them, and there is often not a clear progression from “mild” drugs to “hard” drugs.

I live and practice in New Mexico, where there is a decades-long problem with black-tar heroin. In contrast to most other areas of the country, treatment providers in New Mexico see people abusing intravenous heroin at far earlier ages. This has to do with the availability of the drug in our state, the family history of drug use, and the limited treatment and prevention resources available in these communities. These kids are no different from other kids in the country. The difference is in their environment.

What does the gateway drug theory have to do with sex? Quite a lot, actually, as there is a strong belief that many forms of sexual stimulation serve as a negative introduction for young men in particular, sending them inexorably careening down a slippery slope, coated in bedroom lubricants, into a morass of depravity and debauchery.

In 1989, serial killer Ted Bundy was interviewed by James Dobson, a psychologist and founder of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. Due to be executed the next day, Bundy told Dobson that his problems began with exposure to pornography at a young age. Bundy explained to Dobson that he used to find detective novels and sexual materials in the trash of neighbors, and that this material was so powerful that it took over Bundy’s life and thoughts:

Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far—that jumping off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond read-ing about it and looking at it.

Bundy went on to describe that every violent man he knew in prison was affected by pornography, and that without pornography, his life, and the lives of those he killed, would have been far different.

This proclamation strikes fear in the hearts of parents everywhere and served as gasoline-soaked fuel for the antipornography movement. My God, what parent would allow their children to view pornography if it might turn them into a serial rapist and killer?

Unfortunately, just as in the case with gateway drugs, there is little evidence to support Bundy’s assertions. First, we must wonder what the people in his neighborhood were like. If finding their pornography in the trash turned him into a monster, what did it do to them? Was he living in a neighborhood of serial rapists and killers? (Geez, what were their block parties like?) No, of course he wasn’t. There was something about Ted Bundy himself, and his life, that led him to make the horrific choices he did. His neighbors who used pornography did not rape and kill the way he did, and neither did the other neighborhood boys who viewed the same materials that Bundy did.

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But, despite the lack of evidence that sex is anything like a drug, or that there is such a thing as a “gateway” in terms of sex (Kissing? Holding hands? Getting to second base?), these concepts are seized on by committed moral groups. In Tennessee, the state just passed a law that prohibits teachers from encouraging any form of “gateway” sexual behavior, characterized as any form of sexual behavior that encourages youth to violate abstinence. Gee, does this mean Romeo and Juliet are banned from Lit class? Are cheerleaders now prohibited from doing the bump and grind? One group particularly at risk are any outside agencies who come into schools to teach sexual education. Based on this law, such groups could now be sued by the parents of youth, for encouraging any behaviors that might lead eventually to sex.

The American Life League has the same agenda apparently, and has targeted Planned Parenthood:

“Just as the goal of a drug dealer is to make drug addicts, Planned Parenthood’s goal is to make sex addicts and they follow the same business model. For instance, Planned Parenthood’s gateway drug is masturbation.”

This is the danger when we allow the unsupported, and unsupportable, assertion that sex is a drug to promulgate through our media. The concept of sex addiction is being used by frightened groups to spread fear and to foster the idea that sexual arousal is a disease, a dangerous influence on our lives and behaviors. In the 15th century, women who masturbated were believed to be opening their souls to the devil. Today, kissing is a gateway to sex addiction. Where will it end?