Gender reveal parties ending in death and destruction
A car releasing blue smoke as it does burnouts and a pipe bomb that explodes with pink smoke. These are just some of the extreme lengths people are going to at gender reveal parties.
Pregnancy
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They’ve sparked bushfires, prompted allegations of animal cruelty and given commentators a whole new platform on which to debate sexual politics.
Gender reveal parties, where even the parents are sometimes surprised to find out the sex of their unborn child in increasingly dramatic ways, have been a hot topic in America this week, following the death of an attendee at one in rural Tennessee.
Even before the tragedy, controversies were bubbling around this increasingly popular phenomenon.
Cynics described them as just another money-spinner promoted by retailers or a “gift grab” from expectant parents, coming as they do ahead of traditional baby showers.
The use of the term gender, rather than sex, is also offensive to some given the potential for gender fluidity.
The usual process, in a growing tradition which appears to have started about a decade ago, comes around the halfway point of a pregnancy.
After a doctor determines the sex at a 20 week scan, they write it down on a piece of paper which is given to the parents in an envelope and then passed on to a trusted friend or family member to arrange the “reveal”.
Designed to be shared on social media, this can range from cutting inside a cake to reveal it’s filled with pink or blue icing to someone taking off a hat to unveil a coloured wig.
But social media being what it is, the process has grown ever more complicated.
In June, a Florida couple filmed their pet alligator Amos chomping down on a watermelon filled with pink dye to tell their friends and family their expected 10th child was to be a girl.
A year earlier, the Kliebert family were labelled by animal rights activists as “cruel” and “hideous” for a similar stunt involving blue jelly.
The trend has spread to Australia, where in April 2018 a Gold Coast couple’s car exploded as a proud dad made blue smoke-producing burnouts.
He was convicted of dangerous driving.
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And in Arizona in 2017, a 47,000 acres bushfire sparked by an expectant father shooting a “boy” target caused more than $11 million damage.
But with the death last weekend of a 56-year-old woman in rural Knoxville, who was struck by a shard of “homemade pipe bomb” that had been designed to explode with colour, even more questions have been raised about the tradition.
And although there is little doubt the parties and the debate will continue, the purported founder of the practice earlier this year reportedly took to social media to question it.
Blogger Jenna Karvunidis said she had some regrets after making public her initial 2008 post about the upcoming birth of her daughter.
“It just exploded into crazy after that. Literally — guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby,” she wrote in July.
And in a turn that we should probably all have seen coming, she explained her 10-year-old daughter Bee liked to dress as a boy, saying: “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!”.