Bakugan

lost_angelwings has complained to me a few times about the awfulness of a morning cartoon called "Bakugan," on one occasion directing me to a clip of the show hosted on Youtube to demonstrate. From the evidence presented I can only concluded this show has no author. Rather, it appears to be generated by some machine similar to those from which entertainment was produced in Nineteen Eighty-Four, standardised tropes, themes, characters and dialogue assembled into the shape of a story; nothing human went into this program.

Words

Stumbled across something interesting recently. Here's how it begins:

I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.

Turns out it’s fun.

Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.

She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,”
“Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”

The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years,

“How’s your longtime companion, Jill?”
“She’s my wife!”
“Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.”

Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.

It is an approach I had considered idly, vaguely. I hadn't thought would be very effective since there is nothing backing up that invalidation - whoever it was directed at could simply move on to the next person and have their social position reinforced, dismiss from eir consideration the person who would not recognise eir marriage.

Perhaps I underestimated the sting people feel at having their accustomed privileges questioned. Certainly I have seen plenty of outrage over supposedly minor matters in the past. I also wonder if it is as effective at being illustrative and persuading people to reconsider as the writer suggests, or if it does only produce momentary outrage. No evidence to say either way whether this is any good at producing long-term effect. Seems worth trying to find out, and could be satisfying in itself even if not. So, this is now something I may give a try, though I have few opportunities in my life at present.

Besides marriage it is also something to try with pronouns, applying neutral ey / eir / em to persons of unknown preference and asking where possible[1]. Not quite the same thing, but we could switch to failure to recognise for people who also do so.

Now I wonder what other things could be applied to the population-at-large in such a way?

For reference, link was originally found here in genderqueer.

[1] "Have you a pronoun preference?" ?