A host should not insist on a gift- but certain parties ( showers, for example) are thrown for the express purpose of setting up a nursery or a household. This is why traditionally showers were not held for each baby- after the shower for baby #1, you should have all of the large items needed for baby #2 unless there was a very large gap n time between #1 and #2. Bridal showers are less common now than they were when newly married couples were leaving their parents’ home and didn’t own a set of dishes. This is also why showers were traditionally not thrown by close relatives of the honoree.Other parties may not be thrown explicitly for the purpose of getting gifts, but few people attend weddings or birthday parties without giving a gift - it’s a social expectation whether the host insists on it or not. I mean, if you want to have a “come here and eat cake event”, you can certainly do that without calling it a birthday party, baby shower , sprinkle or gender reveal party. I am going to a birthday party today for a one year old. If my niece had simply wanted to invite us over to spend time together, it could have just been a Labor Day weekend BBQ. But it’s not.
My wife and I. not so long ago, made sure we didn’t know what we were having as it made no difference anyway and we rather liked the thought of the day itself being a complete mystery from start to finish.
Mind you we didn’t have any pressure over it either, the only people present at the hospital were me, her and the little ones. We did note that lots of other people in the other delivery rooms had a whole extended familiy sitting outside with presents and balloons and all sorts. We found that wierd and if that’s how close the family want to be does that increase the pressure on people to micromanage every last aspect of it?
Never heard of a gender-reveal party in the UK though, I expect it does happen somehwere.
I think social media distorts normal human interactions and makes too much of it into a contrived contests for external validation from casual acquaintances, which in turn drives these manufactured events.
Someone posts a video of themselves finding out the gender of their child and now everyone has got to throw parties so the entire thing can be posted on Facebook to gather those precious tokens of approval.
Something similar is happening with Mormon families when the young man or woman gets called on a mission. It used to be that you would get a letter, open it, call your grandparents and a few friends and life went on.
Now people post 30-minute highly produced videos of the entire day, including a standing room only party.
I get the sense that there are elements of one-upmanship about
Some of these things.
If you like it, fine. But don’t link a 30 minute video and expect me to watch it.
And you are also accusing people who have negative opinions about gender reveal parties of forcing others to adhere to their standards, which I think is unfair.
I do believe that retirements, birtdays, and weddings are self-centered events. I’m not one to assign bad qualities to something that is merely self-centered, though. Self-centered isn’t necessarily bad. But gender reveal parties strike me as self-centered affairs that are being passed off as non-self-centered affairs. Moreover, it isn’t even about the baby, but what the baby’s genitalia are. So it’s weird self-centeredness.
Also, birthday and retirement events are not an invention of social media. They have existed for generations. Gender reveal parties are new-fangled and thus have the veneer of “made-up nonsense” to them. Like the whole prom proposal schlock. Yeah, it’s just young people having harmless fun. But IMHO it’s still fair game for negative judgment.
And sure, you don’t have to buy anyone a gift. Even if you show up empty-handed at a baby shower, no one is going to kill you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t judge someone who throws a gender reveal party in an obvious attempt to grab gifts. Tackiness is a real thing. I think it is perfectly reasonable to call out tacky social trends. I think calling out tackiness encourages more considerate behavior.
I think your gender reveal party has jumped the shark if Subway is throwing shade on it.
Just sayin’.
Celebrate it? Sure. Of course it’s a big deal. But in just the last few years, these sort of events have become increasingly standard. I think of them as “look cutes” --events where you want everything to be super produced and creative and slick, so everything “looks cute” in the pictures. Many involve custom props and professional photographers.
Here’s a list. I have starred the ones that existed fifteen years ago.
High school–
[ul]
[li]Promposals[/li][li]Senior Pictures*[/li][li]Reaction vids for college acceptances[/li][li]Graduation*[/li][li]Graduation party*[/li][/ul]
Young adulthood
[ul]
[li]Public Proposal[/li][li] Engagement photo shoot[/li][li]Wedding party invites (where you ask people to be Bridesmaids in elaborate ways)[/li][li]Wedding showers*[/li][li]Bachelor/Bachelorette parties*[/li][li]Bridal Suite (where the bridesmaids all wear matching kimonos and get photos made of getting hair and makeup and stuff)[/li][li]Wedding, Wedding photos*[/li][/ul]
Parenthood
[ul]
[li]Cute baby announcement/staged photo[/li][li]Gender Reveal Party [/li][li]Nursery theme*[/li][li]Baby Shower*[/li][li]Newborn Photoshoot [/li][li]Sip and See (this is when you have an open house and invite people stop by and see the baby)[/li][li] Monthly photos (with the chalk board, all cute).[/li][li]Big First Birthday Party*[/li][/ul]
Even the things that existed ten years ago have been ramped up to another level: senior portraits used to happen in a studio: now they go to ever more elaborate locations and have ever more elaborate costume changes. Bachelor parties are now whole weekends. A nursery theme used to be bedding and a couple pictures–now it’s transforming a room into a wonderland.
Obviously, very few people do every one of these things, but the sum total of them is overwhelming. It’s so much sharing, it’s so much making events out of everything. To me, it looks like so much pressure to live a curated life, where you are publicly displaying your emotions in a carefully proscribed way. It puts everyone in a fishbowl. There’s women out there right now worried about keeping their nails done all the time because their SO may propose and if he does and their nails look bad in the pictures, they will make a bad impression. And god help you if your emotional reaction–or the way you show it–isn’t what people want to see. You’re disappointing the masses. There are social circles where these things seem brutally competitive, almost. It’s an emotional circle-jerk–instead of orgasm, it’s "sqwweeeeee"s.
I’m not so much judging the individuals that do these things as I am shocked at what seems like a sea change in society, in how we interact with each other. Should I be working with my 8 year old to make sure he knows how to pose in “candid” photos? Is that going to be an essential life skill in the world he grows up in? I’m pretty sure most people age 14-30 have a set of poses and expressions they’ve worked on. I think you have to, these days.
But weirdly, lately, I’ve seen more and more where the parents DO know and they are “revealing” it to others. Which seems insane. It makes it about the parents enjoying the reactions of the guests, not the other way around. But the simple reality is that no one cares about the sex of the baby like the parents do: for everyone else, either way is the same. It’s only the parents who are going to find the rhythms of their lives potentially fundamentally shaped by boy or girl. Making the party about the GUESTS reactions shows a real lack of perspective about the whole thing.
Fuck 'em. I care not the least that you’ve spawned, and I care even less what sex the new drain on the planet is. More and more these “events” are causing fires, property damage and civil unrest. If I were God-Emperor such an activity would be dealt with by a weed-whacking to the genitals.
But gender reveal does not equal gift demanding, no more than weddings equal
brides demanding guests pay for the cost of the wedding. One can have a classy wedding, gender reveal, birthday, or Super Bowl party. One can have a tacky wedding, gender reveal, birthday, or Super Bowl party.
To use a stark example, it is unfair to imply that weddings are lame because some are indeed lame: a blanket criticism of weddings is unfair to a couple that just got hitched at city hall or whatever. People ought to call out what is tacky, and any kind of party isn’t inherently tacky.
I hadn’t thought about this aspect, and now I suspect you’re right. So I guess I should suck it up and attend and pretend it matters to me if the cake is pink or blue.
If you don’t want to attend, don’t. There are other ways to bring comfort and assurances to the mother-to-be.
People have done crazier things for love!
But maybe what she really needs is to know that she and the baby have your support. In spite of the bad decisions that have led to the present.
I worked with a woman from Iran who became a good friend. I wanted to throw her baby shower, but she seemed oddly reluctant. She thought we were going to actually bathe her! But she said the same thing at the party: in Iran, you never gave anyone a baby gift until the baby was born. It was a big deal to drop by the hospital with a gift.
I don’t see the greed, unless folks are fishing for gifts through it. I’m all about any reason to have a party.
Except for this reason. Don’t have a party for this reason.
We’re in a time when gender roles and gender identity are becoming increasingly fluid and left up to the individual. Anyone who supports individual liberty ought to be 100% behind this change. Parties that celebrate, before a person is even born, what their role will be, are gross, and exactly what we ought not be doing.
Never been to one and most of my heterosexual friends are probably past the baby making stage.
But I don’t like them because any news mention of one means that some of my more activist friends in the LGBT community have to virtue signal their outrage on social media
Poor you. Thanks for virtue signaling your outrage at virtue signaling, though! 
In Switzerland it’s considered bad luck to even wish somebody happy birthday before the actual day. So no baby showers and certainly no gender reveal parties.
My mom’s cousin’s granddaughter did one, but it was basically only close family, and it was her, her mother and her grandmother, holding the gender reveal “fireworks”, which basically all went off at the same time, showering the lawn with blue bits of something which I hope is biodegradeable.
She shared the video and also announced the name. So I know it’s a he and his name starts with a D. No idea when he’s supposed to arrive, since she assumed everybody already knew that info.
They had fun. My opinion? It’s amusing and an excuse to get together and have fun. So have fun. There are those who take it a bit too seriously, and that’s not good.
I think that’s very much the point of them. Far from a coincidence it’s a deliberate attempt to push back against the concept that anything about gender is at all vague or fluid or anything other than entirely determined at birth and unchanging throughout time, even though the colors used signaled the opposite gender 100 years ago (pink was for boys, blue for girls). I definitely picture the people throwing them to be the kind of person who both asks an eight year old boy ‘do you have a girlfriend yet?’ and asks an eight year old girl ‘what kind of husband do you want when you grow up’ but also insists that prepubescent children can’t possible know anything about their sexuality or gender.
Humorously they’re also quite dangerous - fireworks at a gender reveal party in 2017 resulted in wildfires doing $8 million in property damage and in Australia ‘burnouts’ have resulted in cars catching on fire and people arrested.
Put me in with the “it’s stupid” crowd. I get annoyed by any hint of over-focus on gender (surrounding girls with pink or boys with sports stuff). Let the kid be who they are, and don’t put all these expectations on them before they’re even born!
This. My non-binary kid and I have spent a lot of time making fun of gender reveal parties…there is a lot of burden associated with gender - whether you are dealing with the expectations of femininity or those of toxic masculinity. And gender reveal parties seem to celebrate the worst of the “girls are pretty, boys are athletic” type of nonsense.
But the great thing about gender reveal parties is that they are so fun to make fun of…our favorite theme “Cupcake or Studmuffin” All I have to do is say “cupcake or studmuffin” and we both crack up
Prom-posals not only existed 15 years ago, but were expected at my high school. I graduated in 2002. My sophomore year, the band and colorguard went to Hawaii for a competition, and one of the guys got the pilot to work a prom-posal into his announcement (“folks, we’re about to begin our initial descent here, so if you could put your seat backs up and your tray tables away, and Stephanie, if you could go with Jared to the prom, that’d be super.”) Ah, the last days before 9/11 when you could just poke your head into the cockpit with a request like that. My boyfriend at the time had a bit of a brain fart; he was normally very romantic, but hadn’t thought anything up for asking me to the prom. He just immediately leaned over, while everyone was still awww-ing for Stephanie, and said, “oh yeah by the way will you go to the prom with me?” I was disappointed; my friends were horrified. He did come over a week later and decorate my house with streamers and pinwheels and signs asking me to the prom after he realized this was A Thing You Were Supposed To Do.
Incidentally, 15 years later, when my now-husband and I first started discussing marriage, I was completely over the proposal. I didn’t like the idea of the man being the one to ask, I didn’t like the performative aspect, and I didn’t like the idea of treating such a serious decision like a surprise party. (In defense of my younger self, prom-posals were for boyfriends and girlfriends; you didn’t put someone on the spot who might say no.) My now-husband affirmed each of my concerns and agreed that doing it in public or posting videos wasn’t his style either. But he said he still loved the romance of the surprise proposal, and there could still be a serious adult conversation beforehand; the surprise could just be when and where the proposal took place. Half-seriously and half-calling his bluff, I suggested I could propose to him instead. He agreed without hesitation. And when I was ready to marry him (it took me a little longer than it took him), that’s what I did. It was pretty low-key; I don’t think anyone else at the restaurant knew what was up. I got him a watch and had it engraved, since he didn’t want a ring. We enjoyed our little secret for the evening, then called our families the next day. We held off on the social media announcement. It was perfect for us; a little bit old-fashioned in the lack of attention-getting, a little bit modern in the lack of sexism.
Anyway, I have no real problem with people throwing themselves parties, but find the gender-reveal party squicky for the gender-norm-enforcing stuff. Wouldn’t it be great if all new parents got nine months of practice loving their future kid without being able to lean on gendered assumptions of who that kid would turn out to be? If every family had male and female names picked out, or just one name that could go either way, and spent some time switching or using gender-neutral pronouns? Wouldn’t that be a great exercise in loving your kid unconditionally, and being prepared to accept them for whoever they are–male, female, cis, trans, nonbinary, gender-conforming or not (some cis het women are still tomboys; some straight cis boys like pink), gay, straight, bi, traditional, or just plain quirky (as my mother learned, even your girly, cishet daughter who does get married after all might still break your heart by refusing to wear white.) How about we try that?