Despite my efforts to do a social media clense, I found myself on Twitter (and Instagram, and Tumblr) just mindlessly scrolling along wasting time instead of being productive, until I came across multiple posts dealing with gender reveal parties. First impression- I thought nothing of it. Was it a bit tacky? Yeah. Did it portray and enforce outdated stereotypes? You betcha. Then I kept seeing them again. And again. And again.
I’m not one to typically rain on someone’s parade (unless I know you well, but by then it’ll be out of love– not malice), but for the life of me, I can’t understand why they are so popular. Heck, even Buzzfeed did a compilation of gender reveal cakes that they found across the Internet.
I get it, or at least I think I do. The polar ice caps are melting, the NRA is up in arms over the fact that they can’t buy out everyone, and Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have a reliable source of water. Everyone has their coping mechanism to give themselves the illusion of happiness for a hot second in this heavily messed up world of ours. Who’s to say gender reveal parties can’t function as the same?
Personally, I sometimes practice escapism through video games and literature. Just recently, I completed Final Fantasy XV, wonderful (and horribly heart wrenching) game where I pretended that there existed a government who had a ruler that actually cared about his people. If I wanted something a bit more realistic, I’d read Animal Farm by George Orwell.
I digress, but maybe I’m digging too deep. Not everything can be reduced to a form of escapism to protect ourselves from the terrors around us. Right?
Maybe these parents-to-be are just genuinely excited to find out if their mini-human will come out as a pistol or a pearl? After all, I’d be pretty intrigued to find out that my hypothetical wife gave birth to a buck or doe instead of a human child.
Parents will parent to whatever capacity they see fit, and to whatever ideology they hold dear. I am not a parent myself, but I would like to think that, in a perfect world, this “capacity” would mean tending to as many needs their child has to the best of their abilities, along with a healthy helping of unconditional love.
So maybe these gender reveal parties are something positive. I mean, the parents are supporting the economy by throwing money into their local bakeries. I mean, if they are so actively interested in the mere sex of the baby, that must be indicative that they’d be as actively interested in things other than what’s between the kid’s legs.
But maybe they’re not. Maybe they buy into the idea of gendered stereotypes so much that once they find out their kid’s sex, they plan their whole lives around the idea that their son would be a pistol packing deer hunter, or their daughter a tiara wearing house wife.
I’m no psychologist, or even a psychology major, but being exposed to the idea that “boy = guns = violence” and “girl = jewelry = vanity” must create a strong divide on what traits they can express.
After all, we wonder why the majority of violent crimes are committed by men, but then gender reveal parties, like the aforementioned, already equate what it “means to be a male” with stereotypically toxic imagery.
I personally would not have a reveal party or cake if I ever become a father, but I hope for those who do are aware of what narrative they expose their children to in regards to, “what it means to be XYZ.”
That being said- gender reveal parties: an expression of love at best, an exercise in damaging socio-cultural stereotypes at worst.
James Cantu
Opinions Editor