In addition to my group’s deliberation “Okay Scooter?! How Should Penn State Ride the Scooter Issue on Campus?” and the “We Are Survivors: How We Can Do a Better Job of Supporting Survivors of Sexual Assault” deliberation, I also attened “Let’s Not Beat Around the Bush: How Can We Fight Stereotypes in Porn?” on Thursday, March 5. 

This deliberation discussed the stigma and stereotypes around pornography and sex workers and proposed several ways to combat this issue. First, the moderators suggested improving sex education. They shared how they feel that sex education is outdated and indirect by teaching abstinence and that this could be improved through a government imposed standard for open conversation about sex and sexaulity. This idea was based off a government implemented sex education program in the Netherlands. With this approach, they successfully fulfilled Gastil’s analytical process of discussing the pros and cons. Their pros included decreasing confusion that comes from porn and lower teen pregnancy and STD rates, and their cons included community backlash and a shift in family dynamic. Participants were in favor of this approach as they felt that the sex education they experienced focused on the negatives of sexual relationships, discussed anatomy rather than relationships, and took a very gendered approach. However, there was not much participant discussion on the cons to this approach as the conversation was dominated by a few people who were very passionate about the shortcomings of current sex education. With that, the deliberation failed to fulfill Gastil’s social process of equally distributing speaking opportunities. 

In the second approach, the moderators proposed fostering a safer environment for sex workers. They built this approach by sharing statistics on the abuse of sex workers. By sharing these statistics, they fulfilled Gastil’s analytic process of creating a solid information base. However, there was some ambiguity with differentiating between sex work and pornography and tying both industries back to the issue at hand. With that, this approach seemed to fail with Gastil’s process of establishing the key values at stake. 

In the third approach, the conversation was directed towards changing cultural perceptions of porn. Some of the perceptions they discussed were the hypersexualization of women, dehumanization of men, and prominence of porn in the LGBTQ community. Through this approach, they wanted to standardize how porn is viewed by people of all communities.

Overall, the deliberation discussed three different courses of action, but I was unsure of how these approaches were possible solutions to one issue. It seemed like each approach related to a different problem under the topic of sex. With that, they satisfied identifying a broad range of solutions but failed at ensuring that there was mutual comprehension about how each approach connected to the bigger picture and what exactly was the bigger picture. Going off of that, I was not able to grasp what the key values of the entire deliberation at large. There were key values in each approach, but there was not a significant overlap or connection between the values. However, the deliberation ensured respect between participants as people listened to each other and remained civil.