Just when you thought the world couldn’t get crazier, and the news media couldn’t be less silly or responsible, Cosmopolitan jumped in to say “hold my beer.” A new piece informs their readers that we shouldn’t celebrate a baby’s sex. If you think about it, this is exactly what you would expect from Cosmopolitan, but it still doesn’t make it any less stupid. (The piece was originally posted at Marie Claire.)
“Cutting into a pink or blue cake seems innocent enough — but honestly it’s not,” reads the tagline.
It’s not! Who knew as a woman who has carried multiple babies in her womb I was engaging in something so nefarious!
Why, you might ask? In the middle of a Syrian refugee crisis, a president accused of buddying up with Russia, and the Islamic State still targeting innocent people, might we, the people of the free United States, concern ourselves with why we shouldn’t celebrate a baby’s gender? Swallow a Xanax before you digest this paragraph — it might relieve the anxiety you’ve felt, as you’ve no doubt participated in one or both of these activities.
But my discomfort with the gender-reveal party goes beyond my standard objection to fanfare surrounding gestational markers — which is primarily that, because we don’t celebrate non-pregnancy-related milestones with the same enthusiasm, we’re reinforcing the archaic notion that a woman’s value rests squarely in her ability to grow tiny humans. The issue with gender-reveal parties in particular is: Aren’t they potentially damaging to said tiny humans?
As a mother of four but also a journalist, friend, daughter, sister, neighbor, Christian, and more, I had no idea that society was “reinforcing the archaic notion that a woman’s value rests squarely in her ability to grow tiny humans.” Is that why the fertility rate among women under 30 has dropped to a new low? Seems a lot of women, and men, value more than just their fertility.
What’s this notion that gender-reveal parties — in the old days we called them baby showers — are “potentially damaging to said tiny humans?” The author claims these parties “don’t actually reveal gender — they reveal anatomy. Gender is a wholly different thing, inextricably tied to the social constructs around it.”
Actually it’s the other way around: A social construct has attempted to hijack gender into becoming the political statement they want rather than the basic anatomy that it is. The author cites a professor who says these parties just give in to gender stereotypes — boys want to be sheriffs and girls wear pink — which is just a shame. Yet for all their politically-correct fanfare, both the author and the professor cited are forgetting: Stereotypes surrounding gender arose for a reason. Boys and girls often gravitate towards certain toys and behaviors because of their gender. That’s been going on for centuries.
The author claims gender-reveal parties leave out people who are androgynous or may later be transgender: “Then there are the millions of kids assigned a sex at birth with which they don’t align: 150,000 American teenagers identify as transgender. In a ritual that celebrates only a binary way of thinking about identity, we’re leaving a cross-section of the population out, adding to a culture of trans and intersex shame. And for what? Confetti poppers?”
But that’s like saying we shouldn’t celebrate a teen getting her driver’s license because people get hurt in car accidents. Or that parents can’t celebrate their child getting into college because some kids go to college, join fraternities and get drunk. Would the author rather have them be transgender so they would be more susceptible to mental illness and be potential suicide risks?
The author concludes gender-reveal parties are narcissistic because they draw attention to the parents and baby, and often because couples tend to try to outdo one another with these parties. Unfortunately, our entire culture has become one of showmanship, and that’s unrelated to babies.
As much as Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire want to complicate this issue and judge parents for it, it’s a lot simpler than they purport: Parents often celebrate gender simply because they are excited to welcome a child to the world and frankly, at 30 weeks, gender is often all parents know about their little person and it plays a huge role in who that child will become.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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