The woman best known for popularizing gender reveal parties has a message for the world: Please stop.
Questa settimana, as more than 7,000 acres in California were burned after a gender reveal led to a massive wildfire in San Bernardino County, blogger Jenna Karvunidis — che è ampiamente accreditato per aver creato la festa di rivelazione del genere — took to Facebook to condemn the over-the-top events.
“Smettila di fare queste stupide feste. Per l'amor di Dio, smetti di bruciare le cose per dire a tutti del pene di tuo figlio. A nessuno importa tranne te,” lei scrisse.
This isn’t the first time a gender reveal party has led to catastrophe, and yet the celebrations have only grown in popularity.
Here’s how we got here.
How these parties became deadly
Karvunidis had her own gender reveal party back in 2008, before they became a Thing. She and her husband went what is now the more traditional route, anche se: cutting a cake that revealed an inside of pink frosting. A girl.
“I just thought it would be really fun for everybody in the whole family to find out,” Karvunidis told NPR last year.
She wrote about it on her blog, High Gloss And Sauce, and at the time it garnered some local attention.
Ma da allora 2008, these celebrations of life have turned into risky endeavors. Though many still opt for the classic blue or pink cake reveal, others have taken more extreme routes.
The current wildfire in California is massive, but it’s just small potatoes compared to a 2017 reveal in Arizona that led to a wildfire spanning 47,000 acri. It all happened when members at the party shot a makeshift target scrawled with the words “Ragazzo” e “Girl.”
The Sawmill Fire, sparked by a gender reveal party, burned more than 45,000 acres that was owned by the state of Arizona and various other agencies, according to the US Justice Department. Firefighters from at least 20 different agencies fought the fire for about a week.
When the target — packed with the highly explosive Tannerite — exploded, a blue cloud poofed upward and immediately ignited the surrounding brush.
It was a boy, and the party ended up costing the guilty patrons more than $ 8 million in restitution.
Just this April, a gender reveal party in Florida also led to a 10-acre brush fire, after similarly using “Tannerite and a weapon” in the reveal, secondo to fire officials at the time.
If the damage done by huge wildfires isn’t enough, such gender reveal parties have also led to property damage (like the plane crash last year in Texas, or the car that burst into flames in Australia).
Last October, in Iowa, an idea for a fun gender reveal party went south when the family unintentionally built a pipe bomb. When the device went off, it wasn’t just blue or pink gun powder that exploded, but the entire pipe did as well, sending shrapnel flying.
A piece of metal hit a grandmother, who was standing about 45 a pochi passi, and killed her.
A burned structure is seen at a wildfire in Yucaipa, California, after a couple’s plan to reveal their baby’s gender at a party went up in smoke Saturday at El Rancho Dorado Park in Yucaipa, when a pyrotechnical device they used sparked a wildfire that has burned thousands of acres.
Parties uphold gender norms, critics say
Danger aside, there’s also overwhelming criticism of the parties as a system that upholds the gender binary — questo è, it’s either a boy, or a girl.
Karvunidis herself has hinted at this criticism as well.
Nel 2019, she wrote that “assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs.”
Studies have backed up this same notion.
One such study, pubblicato in 2017 by Carly Gieseler in the Journal of Gender Studies, characterized the harms of the gender reveal party like this: “It allows adults to recuperate what they have learned from their own gendered constructions, reinscribing expectations and assumptions onto the unwritten body of the unborn and propelling these ideals into the digital, sociale, public world.”
As for Karvunidis’s daughter, the focus of that pinnacle pink cake in 2008, she’s “a girl who wears suits!” Karvunidis wrote — meaning to highlight the futility of celebrating these gender norms.
