It’s me again, the Metaphor Enjoyer. I find no greater thrill than when our bloated culture belches forth another living metaphor for my files, recent joys having been often property-based and monumental: the glassy new builds chucked up behind Victorian facades, for instance, the wobbliness of authenticity discussed over four storeys of visual tension; or the 25m “sky-pool”, a see-through swimming pool suspended from the roof of a skyscraper in Battersea, from which millionaire residents can look down at the less fortunate. In 2013, developers of a glass office block of bankers and insurers in central London were alerted to the fact that reflections from its mirrored windows were burning down its neighbours – a Jaguar parked across the street melted.
I love them because they are bigger than words. They are grand and stupid and occasionally fatal. See, for instance, the recent death of a 56-year-old woman at a party in Iowa where the firework her family had made, its colourful smoke intended to reveal the sex of their unborn baby, instead acted as an amateur pipe bomb.
Gender-reveal parties, a trend that began in America with cakes cut open to reveal sponge of pink or blue, have mutated and infected families with a communal itch for expectant parents to find ever-more creative ways to endanger their friends while telling them the gender they’re assigning their unborn child.
A month earlier, a pilot in Texas planned to fly his plane at a low altitude in order to drop 350 gallons of pink water in honour of a recent ultrasound scan. Soon after dumping the water, the aircraft lost altitude and plummeted to the ground. And last year a father-to-be started a 47,000-acre wildfire in Arizona when he shot a gun at an explosive target full of blue powder, causing $8.2m of damage.
If so many people hadn’t been killed, maimed, or lost their homes, I’d be whooping. Because there are only so many times you can drone on about such concepts as “toxic masculinity” or the problem with gender roles before those around you start sneaking looks at their phones then apologising profusely but they have to leave immediately, you wouldn’t believe it but their house has flooded, bye.
There is an essential beauty in the phrase “show, don’t tell”, one that our feminist overlord has taken to heart, sighing, no doubt, as she flicks small planes from the sky. Simpler in many ways than repeating the warning that the onset of adolescence triggers rigidly enforced gender expectations linked to lifelong risks of mental and physical health problems. Expectations including, but not limited to, the idea that girls are objects and boys are predators, that girls are vulnerable and boys are strong, concepts illustrated with the use of pink angels and blue tractors on every babygrow from here to Iowa.
The gender-reveal party, which not only conflates gender with biological sex, but often goes out of its way to reinforce troublesome stereotypes (in Pampers’ online guide, they recommend party themes including “Touchdowns or Tutus,” a choice so old-fashioned when I type it the words appear in sepia) suggests that on some level, the parents are not only aware of the conversation about gender expectations, but are deliberately denying it. It’s not just that they are attempting to apply a kind of order to the freakery of pregnancy, a calming of inner chaos akin to investing in the very best off-road buggy, no. With their noisy explosions and elaborate stuntery, parents disturbed by a world that is rapidly moving to accept and understand the nuances of gender appear to be smothering their anxieties with pink glitter, icing them like a cake, and uploading them to the internet like a signal from simpler times.
It will soon be possible for an influencer to present her Truman Show-like back catalogue, going through her mascara tutorials and early lip-synching days, back to her role as a toddling extra in her father’s kitchen comedy routines, and then to pre-birth, a cloud of stilettos exploding from a piñata. She was already written.
The more gender-reveal parties that go viral, the more gender-reveal parties go viral. They reproduce, like their parents, each iteration less questioning of its meaning and more celebratory of its stunt. The one-upmanship extends beyond cities and countries, across the internet: a party in Arizona inspiring couples in Slough to stand in Tesco today weighing up the size of a watermelon to fill with blue bottle flies, and how its explosion would read on Instagram; as, no doubt, in another town another couple chuckles fondly together as they insert the final shard of blue glass into a makeshift projectile device, or feed the rabid dog a meal of strawberries to make its foaming spittle pink, or tie the bungee rope to a motorway bridge, or load their rifle with frozen blueberries, the metaphor wakes once again and prepares to manifest the danger of gender roles. There will be blood.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman
