This reminds me of a “This American Life” episode — https://www.thisamericanlife.org/610/grand-gesture — reporter Elna Baker, who is an ex-Mormon, told several stories about elaborate gestures that were common and expected in her Mormon community.
She mentioned that she used to be obsessed with grand gestures, but grew out of them, in part, when she realized that you could show someone how much you liked em by having sex.
I have no problem with people throwing parties. I have a problem with people “throwing themselves parties” when there is an implication that gifts are expected and those gifts can’t just be contributions to the food or drink to be consumed.
This is hyper-representation. It’s not enough to have a baby, (and throw a baby shower). Increasingly people seek to validate human experience by creating events which can be represented and documented through social media. The representation of the event is the actual purpose, more than the event itself.
I think it’d be fun to have a gender reveal party, and the reveal shows…purple.
I agree that too many of life’s moments get the Hollywood treatment. The most egregious is weddings, which in some cases have become a Broadway show:
groom sings to the bride (or vice-versa) during the ceremony*
couple’s first dance is choreographed
father-daughter dance is choreographed
costume-changes for bride between wedding scene and reception scene
It’s all directed outward, toward the audience (guests, youtube, social media). People aren’t there to witness the vows and celebrate the marriage; they’re there to be impressed by an extravaganza. Not that all weddings are like this. My kids’ were beautifully low-key.
*In one I attended, the groom sang to the bride from a church balcony. Everyone applauded.
Some of those things can make sense ocassionally; the problem is when a group of people (be it a handful of friends or half a town) gets into a “who can make it bigger” mindset. Heck, I wish my BFF had changed out of her wedding dress: between the strapless top and the huge skirt, that monstrosity was a danger to self and others.
But then, I never went to prom - my boyfriend and I went to a Beach Boys concert instead. And I think we had a better time doing that than going to prom.
This might be part of it, but also over-genderfication of small children has been increasing over the last few decades from what I recall in the 70’s and 80’s and IMO it has a commercial purpose - it’s meant to stop little girls from handing down their bikes, woolly hats and Lego blocks to their little brothers, thus encouraging you to go buy another bike, woolly hat and bin of Lego blocks of the alternative colour scheme. (Didn’t work on us, but we did think ahead and prefer the purple bike…)
Count me as another “dumb reason but hey! a party!”
They strike me as a bit of a gift grab (if they’re ASKING for gifts, that is), but otherwise I think they’re just for fun.
As for gender roles, and if the kid turns out trans, or non-binary, I would worry about that when and if it came. No use fussing over such things before the kid’s even out.
And funny, even when you try to avoid gender roles, the kids DO stick to them on their own. My cousin’s wife isn’t very girly, and she HATES the color pink, so she decided they’d go with purple. Well, guess what their daughter’s favorite color is?
Quite honestly, if I were having a kid, I’d rather wait and be surprised. That was the case with some of my family members recently – they didn’t want to know in advance.
I’m guessing the doctor (or whoever lets them know in advance?) would contact them first? At least, I would hope so!
True, tragedies happen – Erik Karlsson of the San Jose Sharks did a gender reveal where he shot an exploding puck to show if his wife was going to have a boy or a girl. It was blue. Sadly, she ended up having a miscarriage.
But then you might as well not throw baby showers either.
Well, yes, one would hope so but experience has taught me that there is often a gap between “ought to” and “what actually happens”.
I prefer not to think of a child being born intersex as a “tragedy” on par with a miscarriage/death. It’s unfortunate, but not the end of the world and should be less of a tragedy than some other types of birth anomalies.
But yeah, I get that parents are unlikely to make a big deal out of “hey, our kid is intersex”. That does leave the question of what a gender reveal party would be like in that case, and if the parents are part of a crowd that does do gender reveal parties you have to wonder what sort of comments would be generated by NOT having one.
Also Manda JO your list was excellent and I agree. Everything is very “extra” and expected these days.
That being said, I’m a person who’s friends kids are all 12 and under and I’ve never seen one of them have a gender reveal party. They may not be as prevalent as you think. OR my friends are just super cool (very possible yaknow)
I didn’t mean an intersex child was a tragedy – although I don’t think I’d throw a party for that kind of thing – I meant a miscarriage. (Or serious birth defects, like anencephaly or what have you.)
Besides, I’m also thinking we kind of take gender too seriously. Like those parents who are starting to raise their kids non-binary (“they-bies”) and say they can choose their gender later. Remember that? That was kind of the opposite of the gender reveal party.
I think SOMETIMES, people confuse gender roles and gender identity. SOMETIMES. (Not accusing anyone here of doing that). Let kids like what they like, and if there IS some deviation from their gender/sex, I’m sure they’ll let you know.
You know? Take it as it comes. Don’t put any pressure on them the opposite way. Just be chill.
(Maybe I’m just thinking of back how it used to be when girls who were tomboys were assumed to be lesbians. Does that make sense?)
Yeah, it makes a LOT of sense because I was one of those little girl tomboys that people were continually trying to feminize to “prevent” me from growing up to be a lesbian. This was exacerbate by my oldest sister being a lesbian who came out in the 1970’s, long before it was OK to do so.
Turns out I’m heterosexual, a solid 0 on the Kinsey scale, but if anything more butch than ever with a deep, deep loathing for anything pink which, as a child, I learned to associate with everything that prevented me from doing the fun stuff I wanted to do.
It’s not the “celebrate girlhood!” concept I have a problem with, it’s celebrating only one type of girlhood, the girly-girl definition. There are a LOT of ways to be a woman. Ditto for the boys - there’s more than one way to be a man and the caricatures of “macho” are repugnant.
People also have a horrid tendency to believe that gender roles were in the fourth tablet Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. They change through time, as well as by location, (sub)culture…
Having spent a lot of time talking to non-binary youth over the past few years - my kid, my friends’ kids, my kid’s friends - no, they don’t - because non-binary youth see them as parts of the same thing. Mine is more non-binary because they don’t want to be defined by gender roles - gender roles is why their gender identity is non-binary. Some non-binary people have gender dysmorphia - their parts don’t match their identity - but that’s far from universal - and is more and more the minority with the people I interact with. Its more that their parts don’t match the expectations other people have for them with those parts - so they turn to androgyny and a non-binary identification in an attempt to shed gender roles.
That likely means, IMHO, that as those who choose non-binary as an identity in their youth because labels are important my shed that non-binary identification as the label becomes less important to who they are…but that doesn’t mean they aren’t non-binary or trans.
I always think about a friend of mine that I’ve known 35 years now. When I met her, she was a Lesbian - didn’t like men at all. And who could blame her, she’d been abused and screwed up and wrote off the whole sex. But over years, she met someone who happened to be male, that she fell in love with and married - she is still (nearing 60 now) resolving those issues from her childhood, but it hasn’t precluded writing off all men as bastards for the past 20 years. Now, her sexuality is part of a continuum, and who she chooses to be with has more to do with the person than the gender - and the label that was so important to her in her late 20s doesn’t apply. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are lesbians, and have no attraction to men whatsoever (my friend’s girlfriend when I met her is still also a friend of mine - and has NEVER had any attraction to men at all), but that there are multiple variables that may affect any one persons sexual attraction - and those may change over time - along with a persons identity. I think gender is similar. I see a lot of young non-binary people running from toxic masculinity or toxic femininity - wanting nothing to do with the aggression of one or the bitchiness of the other because they’ve been hurt and damaged by it.
Uh, Dangerosa… you actually seem to be agreeing with the second part of what Guin said. As for the first part, the whole “gender” vs “biological sex” vs “identity” vs “orientation” vocabulary mess is still relatively new, is it any wonder people are confused? Specially since different people have different definitions of each expression. Is biological sex defined by your genitalia, by your genitalia at birth, by your chromosomes? Depends on who you ask. And that’s the concept which used to be the easy one!
