The gender-reveal party has been around for about as long as Instagram has, and the two have gotten out of hand at roughly the same speed. Gender reveals now precede or even replace the traditional baby shower, marking the occasion when the proud parents first learn the sex of their unborn guest of honor. Until recently, expectant parents received this information without much fanfare during a routine ultrasound, or perhaps by phone, when a doctor called to relay amniocentesis results. But around a decade ago, people started passing the results, under seal, to obliging bakers, who would bake pink or blue cakes, conceal them in neutral-colored frosting and then deliver them to be cut open at a party in front of friends and family. The “reveal” allowed the parents to be surprised in public, record the moment for posterity and share it across social platforms, signaling which aggregation of gender norms and limitations friends and family were to immediately begin heaping on the fetus’s soft-skulled head.
Performative happiness, of course, is fueled by one-upsmanship. As extravagant as the cake reveal seemed at first, it quickly became commonplace. And so the reveals began to escalate — into spectacular feats, outlandish props and pyrotechnic displays, like a Super Bowl halftime show of gender expectations.
No wonder, then, that these stunts go most viral when they go most spectacularly wrong. The most recent example involves a black car on a rural road on Australia’s Gold Coast, drifting slowly, spinning its wheels, pumping out billowing clouds of powder-blue smoke. Figures jog alongside it, making videos with their phones; a drone hovers overhead, capturing the official record of the moment. And then, in the course of what looks like a celebratory doughnut, the car bursts into flames. The figures surrounding it begin dashing around in a panic. The driver — who will later be convicted of dangerous driving — leaps out and flees. Even the drone shoots up and away.
The “burnout” gender reveal is apparently big in Australia; last year, another car burst into flames while announcing a girl. Gender reveals play with fire — quite literally. In what is surely the most infamous announcement of all time, a Customs and Border Protection agent started a 47,000-acre wildfire in Arizona with his color-coded explosives, causing more than $8 million in damage and turning an inconsequential private moment into a public catastrophe. He pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $220,000 in restitution, along with starring in a public-service announcement for the United States Forest Service.
This is the gender reveal in its baroque phase. Social media moves personal milestones, like expecting a child, into the public realm, which pushes people to mark them with ever more elaborate announcements. Proposals and weddings, too, have snowballed into performative spectacles. Tellingly, the visual language of the gender reveal mimics the escalating drama of reality-television finales — as though there are two genders competing to be born, but only one will be revealed as America’s Next Top Baby.
The baby shower is, traditionally, a feminine space. Now that fathers participate in parenting in ways they did not even a few decades ago, it’s only natural for them, too, to be included in these prenatal rituals. For some, evidently, this requires replacing the usual parlor games with something more aggressively masculine. Gone are the days of proffering “It’s a girl” cigars in sex-segregated waiting rooms; the gender reveal is now a baby shower with stunts. Perhaps you’ve seen the one with the baseball filled with blue powder hitting Grandpa on the head. Or the one with the sky diver landing in a ring of pink smoke. Or the alligator wrangler who has an alligator bite down on a balloon filled with pink smoke. Even the old pink-or-blue shorthand has given way to amped-up gender signifiers and strangely lurid themes, like “Rifles or Ruffles?” and “Guns or Glitter?”
The unpleasant belief underlying “Guns or Glitter,” obviously, is that gender is destiny — that learning this single thing about a fetus will answer almost every other question you might have about the child you expect to parent. Perhaps people place so much importance on this revelation because, until that point, the child remains an idea, a featureless abstraction. At the instant a sex is assigned, an image forms — an image of a person who is, before all else, gendered. The announcement offers a green light to start layering the unborn person with signifiers: to plan outfits and decorate rooms, to imagine bonding rituals, to project your own insecurities and unfulfilled longings. It’s a surprise party designed to eliminate surprises, to set expectations and assumptions and boundaries, to create a kind of reductive certainty where there was once nothing but uncertainty. By its very nature, it sets everybody up to fail.
For that failure to end in a flaming vehicle shouldn’t be funny, but judging by the comments on the video, it clearly is. The appeal of the gender-reveal disaster video is rooted in contempt: It’s a schadenfreude delivery system, comeuppance porn for a new kind of social overreach. Each video originates as a homespun production, documenting a moment of great significance to a handful of people. Great care and elaborate planning, obsessive pomp and circumstance, have been devoted to announcing the very first thing most parents know for certain about the child they expect and all the cultural baggage that child will be burdened with. And when it all goes wrong, it exposes a surprisingly intimate moment of cognitive dissonance and uncertainty — the very kind of anxiety and lack of control that gender-reveal stunts are designed to dispel.
It’s like that saying about how to make God laugh: Just tell him your plans. Anyone who has noticed that the world does not divide, neatly and comfortably, into guns and glitter, touchdowns and tutus, will know that this whole ritual is set up, like a Jenga tower, for the fall. A good car-on-fire video is cathartic in that it cuts straight to the dramatic reversal, without having to wait 10 or 20 years to watch all the colored smoke dissipate and reveal messy human individuals, full of surprises and contradictions, in the place of ossified symbols of masculinity and femininity. A gender-reveal disaster plays the whole thing out in under a minute, with all the thrilling neatness of a 1970s disaster movie, in which a particular kind of overconfidence is inevitably punished by God, or by physics.
Come to think of it, these could be the disaster movies of our time. All the right components are there: human folly, hubris, typecasting, flames. When you click happily on the latest gender-reveal failure, you watch for the satisfaction of seeing certainty upended — not majestically, on the big screen, over the course of three hours, in Sensurround, but on the small one, with a cast of a dozen, in one calamitous instant.
