Follow-up on Thursday's Discussion

Our discussion last Thursday on virginity pledgers hit on a number of controversial topics, namely the affects of Reality TV as well as Disney Channel pop stars on the public and, particularly, young teenagers. One of the first points brought up was that virginity pledging itself, though a well-known concept, is not heavily advertised to all audiences. This became evident when a portion of our class was not aware of many of the disney channel stars that made virginity pledges because they were simply not  part of that audience. Another debate we had was whether these celebrities were making these pledges simply for money or for personal religious purposes and the class seemed to agree that most of these stars probably did believe in the pledges, however Disney probably caught on to how much revenue could be generated from this soon after. The class also had some disagreement regarding the affects of Reality shows in general on the public and quite a few good questions were raised. A few good questions were what type of demographic watches these shows and why do they watch them in the first place? Though the class had difficulty finding concrete answers for any of these questions, it was agreed upon that unlike disney channel, reality tv show had a very wide audience, but at the same time a very wide influence on that audience. Tying it back to virginity pledgers, part of our discussion addressed how young teenagers perceive reality shows and tv in general and how this affects their perspective on sex or abstinence. In relation to this, Haenfler mentioned a few statistics in the chapter that seemed to indicate that overall virginity pledges were ineffective, which begs the question why did those people make the pledge in the first place? In an effort to answer this question we discussed the impact of parents or religious figures on teenage perspective on sex versus the influence they deem from the media.
Though the class remained on topic during the whole discussion, there were a few topics that we ran out of time to talk about or barely touched on. The main issue we failed to discuss was the relationship between the LGBT community and virginity pledgers in general. The question that we were supposed to discuss was about the treatment of LGBT individuals by virginity pledgers or religious groups in general and how the relationship has evolved between these two groups in the past as well as how it may change in the future. I'm sure everyone has been exposed to these issues at some point or another during their lifetime. If there was something any of you wished to say in class related to this question or any of the others that we discussed, feel free to post about it on the blog.