nevermind
Rural people are no less capable than city people of understanding the risks of starting fires, especially in hot, dry climates during fire season. I assume. Am I wrong?
Anyway, gender reveal parties sound like something urban and suburban yuppies would do. It doesn’t strike me as a rural thing.
Slate outlines the recent history of carnage and gender reveal parties:
Officials have called on people to really think twice before using any kind of explosive to announce the sex of their baby. And many say it’s time to retire the practice altogether, including a women who has been credited with being one of the people responsible for popularizing gender-reveal parties. “It started to take a turn,” Jenna Karvunidis said in a 2019 interview. “Then I started to realize that nonbinary people and trans people were feeling affected by this, and I started to feel bad that I had released something bad into the world.”
Sounds like the real issue is that somehow gender reveals are done explosively. Which would be an a) an irresistible attraction for ruralians, and b) a reason for urban / suburban types to move the party to a rural / parkland venue.
The punchline being that the parties would always be rural even if the partygivers are not.
Fuck Yea!
BOOM
That’s exactly what happened with the woman who originally popularized gender-reveal parties (and who no longer advocates them). Well, okay, not the fire, but her child did come out as either trans or nonbinary years later.
So yeah, gender-reveal parties are kind of stupid. I did hear about one cool one, though, where a young man came out as trans and his parents had a gender-reveal party to share the news with family and friends. I thought that was neat. No fire, too.
To the profound dismay of Evangelicals everywhere …
I imagine it might be a way for some people to loudly proclaim that birth sex and gender are exactly the same and you can’t change the later.
For the legal term: “negligent stupidity”
For short hand: “faux brainer” (since “no brainer” doesn’t have a did-something-stupid angle to it)
Similar idea:
Theoretically, this is true. Of course, in today’s connected world, these people are also theoretically capable of being well-informed citizens, armed with all of the facts of the world…
And we see how well that works out. 
Yeah, but even if it’s a straight up “our baby will have these genitals” announcement, there’s still an element of uncertainty there. Waved an online friend off as she went to give birth to Julia - 24 hours later, I was amused to be introduced to Jude.
I’m thinking that, in our modern exceedingly-warm age, it might be time to call on people to just stop using explosives for announcing – well, anything. Or just leave the handling of explosives to trained professionals.
–G!
As I understand the custom, if it’s a girl you burn down a forest. What do you destroy if it’s a boy?
The woods. But only in the morning.
That word is pregnancy.
The Patriarchy.
In my neighborhood, the 4th-of-July storm begins sporadically in mid-June and on the big day is a ceaseless wall of noise. The smell of sulfur in the air finally abates by around Bastille Day (not so many French partisans around here). If you took away their boomy-boomies, I am not sure what would happen to all that excess testosterone. Probably nothing productive or useful.
Now I’m trying to remember if my sister’s (kid’s) gender-reveal cake had candles on it or not. In any case we managed to reach the end of the party without burning the house down.
I like a party as well as the next guy, but even I thought the whole occasion was so stupid and pointless as to be a waste of time - despite the free slice of cake. Perhaps setting off a block of C4 would have caught my interest?
It first transmutes into beer. Then for those fortunate enough to survive the “Hey y’all! Watch this!” phase, it transmutes again into piss.
The big problem is the people with fireworks are also likely to be people with guns. They will make a boomy-boom one way or another. At least with fireworks the people injured are usually* the assholes shooting them off. You can’t say that about gunfire.
-
- I’m not counting the damage done by fires started by assholes with explosives. That’s a whole 'nother series of threads!