Gender Reveal Party

So it was 2008 that summer, I was pregnant and a coworker of mine was three or four months ahead of me with her pregnancy.

And it was time for her to have a baby shower at the office.

And so naturally, as the other pregnant lady working there, they were like, Jenna, you're in charge of the cake.

And I was like, great.

I made this little cake that looked like a duck.

It had a little separate extra cake for the ducky head and little candies for the tail.

I just thought I was really fabulous.

It was primitive by today's standards.

We had the baby shower at work and I was just so obsessed with like this cute cake.

I just love that whole aesthetic of doing things extra.

And I'm like, I need another occasion, like right now.

I need to make this cake again.

So I was pregnant, but I mean, I was like,

three months pregnant.

I'm like, my baby shower is going to be months away.

And

and I realized that my anatomy scan was coming up, the anatomy scan where they scan for the health of the baby, and you also can learn if it's a boy or a girl.

And so, I was like, you know what?

We're going to turn this into an occasion.

We'll surprise everybody if it's a boy or a girl.

I'll make two of these ducky cakes I'm obsessed with.

Yes, overkill.

And I'll fill one with pink icing and one with blue icing.

And I'll put them in the kitchen.

And I'll have my sister-in-law deliver the news to a barbecue party.

And so

I thought that way we can all find out together.

It'll be such a moment.

I won't even know.

Like, I will literally find out at the same time as everybody else.

We have the barbecue.

And like I said, nobody's getting it.

We're just, they're kind of annoyed that I've made everybody go out on a school night.

The moment that we cut into the cake, it's almost like the weather changed.

It just felt like everything changed.

We cut into the cake.

We all see that it's pink icing and it's just like our close family and like two or three friends.

It's like everyone got so excited.

I mean, they were,

there were tears.

People were like, oh my gosh, my friend said, it seems like she's been born.

I mean, it was like this moment.

And I got what I wanted.

I got to make my cake and I got everybody really excited that we were having a girl.

My name is Jenna Carvanitas, and I was an early adapter to social media.

And I happened to throw the first gender reveal party 11 years ago when I was pregnant with my first daughter.

And now I completely cringe at the entire trend.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Every month we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

It's been a little over a decade since Jenna Carvanitas threw her party, and in that time, gender reveal parties have metastasized.

These parties, at which expectant parents and their guests learn the biological sex of their future child with some kind of surprise display of pink or blue, have become an inescapable commonplace, a social media staple, a multi-million dollar business, and a controversial flashpoint, as disdained as they are popular.

In this episode, we're going to stick closely to Jenna, whose story is a window onto the rise of the gender reveal party and the rise of the backlash, the gender reveal party.

Whatever you think about gender reveal parties, they did not exist a decade ago, and they may not exist a decade from now.

They are a a ludicrously contemporary expression of our current moment, the 2010's version of a fondue party or a consciousness grazing group.

So today, I'm decodering.

Why are gender reveal parties having a moment?

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I want to come clean right up front.

Going into this episode, my feelings about gender reveal parties were basically luck.

I've never been to a gender reveal party, and I've never even been invited to a gender reveal party, but I've seen a lot of them on social media, and my sense was that they were cheesy and ridiculous and conservative.

Over-the-top celebrations of little girls' imagined genetic predisposition to liking Disney princesses.

What I found from actually watching gender reveal videos and talking to people about them, though, is that they can be divided loosely into two groups.

The majority are relatively intimate celebrations enjoyed by diverse, mostly middle-class families who gather with friends, relatives, and excitable older siblings in backyards, living rooms, and restaurants to cut cakes, dyed blue, pop balloons stuffed with pink confetti, and shriek in genuine happiness and delight.

I mean, Don't get me wrong.

These videos are still full of hot pink and electric blue everything.

Glitter, paint, smoke, piñatas, confetti, clothes, and every kind of dessert.

But they're also kind of homespun.

And the people involved seem so thrilled and excited that I started to feel a little grinchy for judging them.

Luckily for my inner Grinch, there's another category of gender reveal party, the kind that gets almost all of the attention.

The absolutely bonkers ones.

Here comes Uncle D, an auntie Caddo flying through the sky, smoke grenades flying off with the color of the gender.

Again, this is going to be the most epic gender reveal ever.

These celebrations, which often seem expressly designed to go viral, involve not only skydiving, but lasagna, crocodiles, guns, and large quantities of the explosive tannerite.

And in one instance, a hippopotamus who was drafted to chomp on a watermelon filled with bright blue goopy jello.

Oh my god!

Yes!

Video of the hippo, which first appeared on TikTok, went viral on Twitter when a user posted it with the caption, I did it, I found the worst gender reveal.

This reaction, a kind of amused, perplexed disdain for the whole phenomenon, is common, a hallmark of the gender reveal backlash.

We're not laughing with gender reveal parties.

We're definitely laughing at them.

Another type of video it's easy to laugh at is the popular gender reveal fail, which feels like watching America's funniest home videos.

Except instead of a dad getting knead in the balls, the cake turns out gray or the balloon does not pop and then floats away, as it did in this video.

But some gender reveal parties have gone wrong in horrible, disturbing, sad ways.

In October of 2019, a woman was killed when she was hit with a piece of shrapnel from a gender reveal explosion.

At the end of 2017, an off-duty Border Patrol agent started a huge wildfire with a tannerite explosion that burned up 47,000 acres in Arizona and made national news.

The blaze quickly spread, reaching the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, destroying more than 45,000 acres of land and racking up more than $8 million in damages.

As I was working on this piece, it felt like just about every day, there was some kind of extreme piece of gender reveal news, some think piece dissecting them, some viral tweet disparaging them.

They feel like a trend that's jumped the shark, but that is still frenziedly swimming along, heading somewhere, maybe somewhere really dark.

So, how did gender reveal parties go from a small, intimate gathering to a literal and metaphorical cultural conflagration?

One that feels like it's either going to burn out or burn down the house?

To figure that out, I want to go back to the beginning, back to Jenna.

The first thing to know about Jenna is that back in 2008, though we didn't use the word yet, she was kind of an influencer.

I think I started my first blog in 99.

I'm old and I was definitely a super early adapter to other parts of social media and on web forums and stuff like that.

And so I had a lot of readers at that time for my blog.

Jenna shared a lot of personal information about her life and about trying to get pregnant there.

And she had thousands of readers who felt connected to her.

The day after the party,

I posted a picture and a little recap of the party.

Here's what happened.

And then I, I'm a little bit of a theatrical type.

I made you click on the picture.

And if you clicked on the picture, you could see what was inside would pop up.

And it was like pink icing of the girl.

One of the people who read Jenna's post worked at a website called The Bump.

The Bump is a site for expecting parents that at the time also printed pregnancy guides, small print magazines that appeared in OBGYN offices in 16 local markets, including Chicago, where Jenna was living at the time.

They asked if they could do a spread about her pregnancy journey and party, and she agreed.

11 years ago, you didn't scroll through your phone when you were waiting for a doctor appointment.

You picked up whatever the free highlights magazine was sitting there.

So this was like that.

Basically, there were women all across the area, perhaps the country, waiting for their anatomy scans.

While they're waiting, nervously, they're flipping through this magazine and they're saying, oh, there's a party.

There's an idea.

I could elevate this.

Instead of getting the gender told to me, the biological sex told to me today, I'm going to put it in an envelope and I can do this exact party tonight.

And that's what happened.

A smattering of people started to have gender reveal parties.

And like Jenna, they put pictures of it on their blogs and on their Facebook pages, inspiring other people to do so, and on and on and on.

Basically, it's a meme, one that's snowballed with the help of social media platforms like Instagram and better cell phone cameras.

At this point, as gender reveal parties have moved into their more extravagant, Rococo, hippopotamus phase, it can seem like social media didn't just popularize the gender reveal party, but that going viral is the whole point of them.

And while I don't want to underplay the way that the most extreme parties seem made for a virality arms race, I still don't think that fully explains the scope of the phenomenon.

Something more emotional is at play, or at least it was for Jenna.

You sort of referred to your pregnancy journey.

What had been your pregnancy journey?

Well, sort of the reason for this party also was I had had three miscarriages.

I was the miscarriage queen.

I was on my, I guess it was my third or fourth pregnancy by then.

So by the time we finally were to the point of the anatomy scan, being at 20 weeks and finding out that the baby was healthy,

finding out if she was a boy or a girl at this party was just icing on the cake.

It's like, finally, this is actually happening for us.

Jenna is really quick to explain that she loves parties and celebrations, but her gender reveal party was doing a little more heavy lifting than that.

And it does for a lot of expecting parents.

There is a clear psychological function that underlies, um, that underlines these gender reveal parties, these behaviors.

And I chalk it up to the following.

Nick Hobson is a behavioral scientist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, where he studies rituals.

So what we do know from the psychology and the science of ritual is that rituals tend to come about

in times of uncertainty.

Pregnancy, labor,

birth, childbearing.

It is an incredibly

anxiety-inducing time, unnerving a lot of uncertainty, tons of unpredictability.

Nick sees gender reveal parties as a new kind of ritual, one that uses new technologies, ultrasounds, and social media to address an ancient reality.

The new parents have no idea what they are getting into.

We've now created this pageantry and built this form of celebration around this one piece of information that we can make certain, which is, is it a boy or is it a girl?

Now we can feel a little bit better about our situation, a little bit better about ourselves, and make sure we get all the proper thinker blue if you subscribe to those sort of clothing gender stereotypes.

At first, I found this explanation to be very unsatisfying.

I have two young children, so I know that pregnancy and infancy are times of great change and uncertainty.

But that's been true for millennia.

Sure, it's only in the last few decades that there's been, with ultrasounds, such a low-risk way to know the biological sex of a fetus in the first place.

But if we so desperately needed some kind of reassuring ritual at this moment, wouldn't we have come up with one already?

But the thing is, we kind of did.

And it's why we dress little boys and girls in pink and blue in the first place.

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Babies, and by babies, I mean even up through like the second year of life when they were walking but not talking very well, were wearing like white dresses.

Joe Paoletti is a professor emerita of American Studies at the University of Maryland.

And she wrote the book Pink and Blue, Telling the Boys from the Girls in America.

There really is no difference between like a baby dress from 1880 and a baby dress from 1910.

There are no boy dresses and girl dresses.

It's just dresses.

It's baby dresses.

White.

White, white, white.

Dressing small children in gender-specific clothing was considered inappropriate because it might make them aware of sexual difference and so of sex at too young an age.

But that started to change in the 20th century as anxiety about sex was supplanted by a more urgent fear of homosexuality that Joe says was passed on to parents by Freud via the influential American psychologist G.

Stanley Hall.

He really believed that in order to prevent homosexuality, and he was specifically interested in homosexuality among men,

boys needed to start identifying with the father early and

this idea of having them either dressed in any way similar to girls or not knowing what they were was a mistake.

So you had to start distinguishing boys from girls earlier.

Boys started being dressed in pants and rompers.

For a while, though, those rompers might have been pink.

Well into the 1900s, both pink and blue were considered interchangeable baby colors.

And that didn't completely change until the 1950s, when there was another blast of anxiety, this time about feminism and what it was communicating to little girls.

This is where all the feminization of girls' clothing, especially little girls' clothing and the use of pink, starts coming in.

To recap, at times of heightened anxiety about masculinity, femininity, and gender roles, parents began to distinguish previously indistinguishable boys and girls from one another by buying colored items that announced the child's gender to the child and to the rest of the world far earlier than they used to.

Basically, pink and blue clothing were a kind of proto-gender reveal party.

This suggests to me the key ingredient of the gender reveal phenomenon, why they're happening right now, and why they keep getting more extreme.

They're a reaction to a huge transformation in the way that Americans understand gender identity and its relationship to biological sex.

At a time when gender, non-conforming, non-binary, and transgender people are more visible than they have ever been, when identity categories that seem for many people to be immutable are changing, when sexism and gender discrimination are all over the news, when the paradigm is shifting, people in and out of their consciousness are grasping for certainty.

And they're grasping for certainty by doing what Americans already did, taking comfort in pink and blue.

This time, shot out of a cannon and posted on YouTube.

But that's the big picture.

On an individual level, having a gender reveal party is much more personal.

So personal that some people are even trying to have progressive ones.

This video may sound like it's from any old gender reveal party, but it's from one that's a little different.

When the expecting parents poured a bottle of mystery paint onto a white piece of paper, the paint wasn't blue or pink.

It was yellow, and that meant they were having a girl.

It's a wannabe gender-neutral gender reveal party.

As we learn more about gender identification, it's going to change the way people go about these parties.

Since 2015, Jonathan Riley has run the company Poof There It Is with his wife, Tori.

They started out making gender reveal sports equipment, hockey pucks, footballs, baseballs that burst into a shimmer of pink or blue when smashed open.

Recently, they faced a lot of competition as big box stores, party supply stores, and Amazon have moved into the gender reveal space, and they keep trying to distinguish themselves.

We've sort of pulled back and didn't put like he or she on our canons.

We did a neutral label, and we offer neutral colors like yellow and white.

So you can still have the party and say we're having a boy, but we're not going to throw it into that category of, oh, it has to be blue.

You know what I mean?

The people who are having this sort of party are presumably progressive.

They know gender is a construct.

They don't want to put their child in a box of rigid gender expectations to pressure them into an identity.

But they do really want to have a party.

I'm not saying there are a lot of these people.

Are people into the yellow and white ones or are people mostly still just getting like the blue and the pink?

People are mostly getting the blue and the pink.

And I'm not saying it's not easy to be eye-rolly about all of this.

I sure was.

For one thing, they feel like they're missing a key point, the way that pink and blue reduce the world into two options, two categories, which gray and yellow get across just fine.

But eye rolls aside, these parties are trying to treat biological sex as a piece of information that's not intrinsically connected to a host of gender norms.

It's a way to try to have your gray cake and eat it too.

I think it's sort of ridiculous.

And how about just don't have the gender real party at all?

Like that would be my sort of approach.

Evan Urquhart is a writer and the comment moderator at Slate.

And he's also a trans man.

But I think there's also something,

you know, something to be said for people hearing the critique and people trying to...

you know, trying to complicate it and trying to have their silly party, but also recognize that gender can be more complicated than, you know, pink and blue tiaras and whatever the heck.

I was much more compelled by this line of thinking than I was by another compliment that's often paid to gender reveal parties, the standard ones included, which is that they are really inclusive of fathers.

Unlike at a baby shower, dads are welcome at these parties and they seem to have gotten really into them.

And isn't their involvement in a domestic pre-birth social occasion something that both progressives and conservatives can agree is a good thing?

It has opened up

and made a more inclusive celebration for

anyone who wants to be part of this big moment.

Carly Geisler is an associate professor at York College CUNY who studies gender reveal parties.

A lot of the times, the men actually become the center of the celebration because for a lot of these activities with the growing spectacle, like the skydiving or you know, shooting off explosions, like and I've seen everything from like

beer chuggings

reveals, chug a pint of beer, and then at the bottom is the reveal of like either a pink or blue ball.

I've seen that happen.

I've seen, you know, a lot of these things.

And in a lot of ways, it's making it more of an open, inclusive celebration for a community, but it also displaces the pregnant woman.

Some of these parties are including fathers by excluding mothers who are treated more like an afterthought, even as their fetuses are imagined to have more and more of a personality, a taste for pink or blue, a love of touchdowns or tiaras.

This strikes me as being pretty emblematic of the whole thing about gender reveal parties.

However well-intentioned, they're often just a little burst of enthusiasm from being all wrong, way too much.

To be totally honest, the slightly woke person is not at all who I was expecting to find participating in gender reveal parties.

The conservative, sure.

The ironic, a little bit.

The unthinking, absolutely.

And if you're looking for a person with progressive politics who didn't think twice about having a gender reveal party, mostly because she wasn't thinking about what they meant, you don't have to look further than Jenna.

She was excited.

She wanted to celebrate, and she did.

Even when she got pregnant with her second child, she now has three girls.

She only didn't have a gender reveal because she thought they were played out.

I felt it was passe.

I saw the party being everywhere, and I'm like, I don't want anybody thinking that I'm copying them.

Like, I invented this game.

I am over it.

Like, I'm definitely not doing that again.

But then around Christmas 2014, she started to change her mind.

It began when her middle daughter, who was just three at the time, got a present she didn't like very much.

She starts crying her eyes out.

And I'm like, what is going on?

Why are you crying?

Stella's like,

why would Santa Claus bring me a boy present?

And I'm like, what are you talking about?

How did Santa Claus bring you a boy present?

And it is just a set of Legos.

It's literally just a set of Legos and like primary colors.

I'm like, well, honey, why in the world do you think this is a boy present?

And she's like, it's not pink.

And it clicked with me.

I'm like, okay.

I feel like my daughters are being given a message by

the world.

I mean,

I didn't come up with this message for her.

I didn't pinkify anything in my house.

Like I told you, my nursery was gender neutral.

My nursery was blue and yellow.

My.

toy room was with primary colors.

She got this message from somewhere and she's getting it from the world who's saying, if it's not pink, it's not for me.

If that can limit what you can play with when you're three, that's going to limit your opportunities when you're getting older.

This epiphany about pink changed Jenna's mind completely about gender reveal parties.

I absolutely hate these parties now if I haven't gotten there yet.

I don't like them.

I think they're terrible.

I mean, I didn't know even in 2008 what we know in 2019 about, you know, gender being a construct and, you know, sexual identity being assigned at such a young age can be so problematic, not just for children, but also for grown adult members of our society who are seeing these parties and who are seeing the reactions that people get.

And why is humanity assigned by gender?

Why doesn't the baby become human and real to us until we've put a boy or a girl stamp on it?

It's, you know, that's that's so harmful to so many people.

Jenna thinks at this point it's impossible to have a party like hers, a kind of dashed off, not overly considered thing.

Too much has changed.

The entire thing has, it's become so meta, it's become so self-involved that people are now, it's reinforced even further.

Pink is for girls, blue is for boys.

This is one type of the world that is for these type of people.

And there's a different part of the world that's for these type of people.

And it's become a problem, much more than it was in 2008.

We didn't think about gender the same way we did in 2008.

Somebody could have a one-off party and it could be a one-off thing, but I don't feel like that's what's happening now.

For Jenna, there's no such thing any longer as an apolitical gender reveal party.

Whatever the throwers' intentions, these parties now have a political signification, and it's implicitly conservative.

And it's true that there are willfully conservative gender reveal parties, ones that intentionally assert the immutable connection between biological sex and gender identity and stereotypical gender roles, and sometimes toss in gun rights to boot.

But I think it's important to keep in mind that gender reveal parties can be unthinking even when they are elaborately planned, even when they are built around really reductive gender stereotypes like guns and glitter, and even when they involve shooting a high-powered rifle at an explosive.

And that's because all the assumptions underlying these parties, for lots of Americans, they're just in the water.

They're what you think when you're not thinking too much.

The disagreement about gender reveal parties, like so many other things, is not quite that one side is saying, they're bad and the other side is saying, they're good.

It's that one side is saying, they're bad, and the other side is saying, why do you have to make everything about politics?

It's just a cute party.

Jenna has actually heard a lot of this, this Don't Rain on My Parade point of view, since this past summer, when she was prompted to share her new views on gender reveals.

Somebody on Twitter, somebody random, I don't follow, they have quite a bit of a following.

They had asked the question to the Twitterverse, you know, something along the lines of,

I want a long-form history of the gender reveal.

And somebody who's been following my social media for like 13 or 14 years remembered me.

She remembered my party.

She remembered the hoopla.

She remembered the article.

And she tagged me and she brought me into the conversation.

The story was so delicious.

First ever gender reveal mom disavows gender reveal parties that it went everywhere.

Jenna was all over the news.

But now the woman who helped start this viral trend is questioning what that first glimpse of pink or blue represents.

You know, it's been an evolution of thought, you know, and nobody was thinking about gender like we do now in 2008.

One of the things about Jennet that's so interesting is that even as she is a very convincing and impassioned spokesperson for all that is wrong with gender reveal parties she's also an example that having a gender reveal party doesn't necessarily predict how you will raise your kids it certainly didn't predict how she treated her oldest daughter her gender reveal baby as she's gotten older we were getting ready for our family picture for our Christmas card.

I plan all of our outfits.

It's my life's greatest joy.

And so I was putting together our outfits.

And so I'm like, okay, so what are we thinking this year?

What are we going to do?

And she's like, well, you're not getting me an address.

And I'm like, hmm, okay, I'm not getting you an address.

And I'm like, okay.

And I was like, you know, what about a suit?

And we both kind of looked at each other.

And she was like, well, do only boys wear a suit?

She was kind of like wondering if like, I got the feeling from her voice that she was kind of worried, like, would I be judged if I did that?

Because that actually sounds pretty awesome.

And I said, girls and women can wear suits if they want.

And I think that would definitely satisfy my criteria of you getting dressed up.

Yes, depending on how we do it.

Or, you know, I still have to have some say, it's not going to be denim.

It's not going to be a denim suit.

Plot twist, by the way, the first, the world's first gender-revealed party baby is actually a little girl who wears suits.

It might be reasonable to assume that a parent who has a gender reveal party is more likely to be hung up on their kid's gender presentation than one who doesn't.

But it's not definitive.

For one thing, who a parent is before their actual child is born, that's preliminary too.

And of course, the reverse is also the case.

Skipping the gender reveal party doesn't mean a parent won't be extremely rigid about gender.

I mean, I'm not a fan of them.

I've never been to one.

I don't think they're good.

I wouldn't recommend them to my friends or family.

Evan Urquhart again.

And yet I also think they're a little bit beside the point.

You know, I grew up in the 80s and it was very more kind of, you know, gender neutral in terms of the toys that kids were allowed to play with.

And my parents had kind of progressive ideas about giving girls trucks.

And things were still extremely strongly gendered in every aspect of life.

And I very strongly got the message that

being a girl was very different from being a boy and that you were not allowed to go from one to the other.

And somehow I managed to pick all that up without.

gender reveal parties being a thing at all.

So I'm a little skeptical of

how much people make them kind of a scapegoat for something that I think is much broader.

Something I kept thinking about when I was working on this piece is how though I would never have had a gender reveal party, I did really want to have a girl.

And when I found I was having one, I was really happy about it.

And it's not like in my mind I was thinking, this is just her biological sex.

Maybe she's not really a girl at all.

Biological sex is just a piece of information, but it is very hard to treat it like just another piece of information, not to put all of our own expectations and history and fantasies onto it.

If I cared that much about my child's sex, if it meant what it did to me, if I threw a little gender reveal party in my heart, how different am I really from a person throwing a gender reveal party in real life?

And is that a difference that really matters?

Or is it just about taste, social milieu, location, about me being in the micro bubble of progressive New Yorkers for whom such a party is obviously gauche?

That's not actually a rhetorical question.

I do think not having the gender reveal party matters.

I do think it's better not to be celebrating rigid and exclusionary gender norms that leave so many people out.

But not having the party, it's not the same thing as being off the hook.

At this point, Jenna doesn't just hate gender reveal parties.

She's ashamed of them.

I cried.

This guy, he burnt down a forest.

I think everybody's heard about this one at this point.

I mean, it was like acres and acres of forestry burned down because of the sky.

And I just felt really like somehow in the cause of chain of events with the butterfly wings, I felt responsible.

And that's awful.

Jenna may feel responsible, but I don't think any reasonable person would blame her for inadvertently bringing this pink and blue phenomenon into the world.

I mean, who could have foreseen what would happen?

Besides, maybe she can take heart in a new subset of parties, ones that take the whole concept and twist it, play with it, take what is inherently funny and reductive about the whole premise and just get really weird with it.

My name is John Mark, and I believe we're talking today because I threw a gender reveal party for the ghost that haunts my boyfriend when I'm not here.

John Mark lives in an apartment building in the West Village with his boyfriend Lucas.

And this past May, Lucas thought he had encountered a ghost there.

I'm like, dude, come on.

Like, there's no such thing as ghosts.

What are you talking about?

And he goes, John, I don't know, man.

Like, I really think that there's a ghost, and he, and I just snapped.

And I say, What do you mean, he?

You don't know what gender this ghost is.

It's 2019.

You can't just assign someone a pronoun.

And we started laughing.

And we then said, What if we found out?

So, John went looking for a medium.

He found a colleague who was ghost-sensitive, and she walked around his apartment one afternoon trying to locate the ghost, which, as you'll hear, they videotaped for their future party.

She believes she could feel a spirit in our bedroom where all of the hauntings had occurred in and around the bedroom.

Well, this is the one that you get haunted in, right?

This is where

it all happens in this area, I would say.

She told them the gender and information in hand.

John and Lucas ordered some donuts from a local shop and invited their friends over for a party.

They asked them to dress for the occasion.

We had about 45 people.

come and we told people to either wear gray, blue, or pink based on like how you were betting it was going to go down.

But I think part of the fun that we were trying to have was like we wanted to kind of make the

all of the invitations and all of the talk around this that you couldn't quite tell if we were poking fun at it or we were taking it super seriously.

And so it was really fun to see people coming and, you know, everyone's jovial, has a drink in their hand.

And we're all like getting ready to like, you know, we're telling everyone at 10 p.m., we're playing the video.

That's when you're going to find out what the gender is you have people uh you know all kind of like you know you see someone in pink kind of come up to someone in blue and go nah man you're gonna be wrong this isn't gonna go down for you this way they played the video this is a part of it

so wait are we are we firmly of the belief it's an eight

And

right then, like, you know, screen flashes blue and everyone's like,

everyone like opens up their, their, you know, they bit into the donuts at the same time.

Everyone's like, it's a boy.

Like a lot of gender reveal parties, this one was really just about having a party, a celebration.

Never bet against Americans' passion for slightly fussy fun, I guess.

More than anything, we just wanted an excuse to like hang out with our friends.

And, you know, so, you know, it's sort of like I remember back in high school, like sometimes all you really just needed was to invite a group of friends over and like you just needed some activity and that was enough to like find us together, whether it's, you know, board game or, you know, doing something else, you know, whatever it was.

And like this kind of felt like the, the, you know, the young adult equivalent of it, right?

Like, we just need, we needed an excuse to gather and like, you know, share a couple bottles of wine.

So why not do it with a fun twist?

The ghost party kind of feels like the wacky yet logical continuation of the whole gender reveal trend.

After the skydiving and the hippos and the cannons and the forest fires, why not a dash of the supernatural?

I mean, sure, they're not exactly the same.

One is a parody of the other after all, and one involves a real baby, but they're otherwise surprisingly indistinguishable.

They both involve a surprise, sweet treats, and a good time.

If nothing else, the ghost gender reveal party reveals to me the flexibility of this format, the way that they can be used by all different kinds of people for different reasons with different messages.

That basically, this kind of party is still young and new and changing, and we really don't know what's going to happen to it next.

If you listen to this podcast with any regularity, you know that I often change my mind about things over the course of reporting an episode.

I talk to a lot of people, and at the end I think, hey, truck nuts, not so bad.

But I have to say, I am still mostly icked out by gender reveal parties.

I do, however, feel a lot of respect for the phenomenon's opportunistic nature, for the way society has collectively conjured these parties almost out of thin air, just from one woman's duck cake.

At a time when people are feeling unsettled by gender, they glommed onto a brand new ritual to soothe themselves about gender.

It's so straightforward, so psychologically on the nose, so neat, I kind of admire it.

Congratulations, America, on developing this extremely precise coping strategy.

Any number of people I spoke with for this piece expressed a desire to see gender reveal parties go in a less gender-focused, viral-obsessed direction.

They talked about how we need a more intimate family celebration that brings loved ones and communities together while acknowledging a real milestone in the soon-to-be parents lives.

And while I completely understand this sentiment, good luck.

Making up a ritual and having it catch on in 10 years, that's hard.

That's creative.

That requires not only social media, but a real sense of urgency.

This is part of the reason why I'm skeptical this trend is here to stay.

It seems designed so specifically for the anxieties of this particular moment.

Can it really thrive in another one?

As gender reveal parties start to seem to so many people like they're reflexively conservative or a dark and egotistical expression of our obsession with virality, can they still be reassuring to others?

Can something that's supposed to be soothing perform that function when it's so controversial?

Gender reveal parties went from being a little shindig at Jenna Carvanitas' house to a crazy global phenomenon to a punchline in just a few years.

I don't think stasis is what's in store for it next.

That's one of the ironies here.

This party Americans made up to avoid having to deal with the way gender is changing.

It didn't really work.

Change found a way to sneak in anyway.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to June Thomas, Christina Katarucci, Kimberly Jolison, Renee Ann Kramer, Frances Pache Guinard, Karina Chicano, Lauren Werner, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you soon.

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