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Gender reveal parties are harmful in so many ways – why do we treat them as quirky?
Gender reveal parties are a form of domestic terrorism
One dead grandmother-to-be. A downed plane. An incinerated car. Several terrifying explosions. An altercation at Applebee’s. A massive wildfire that burned 47,000 acres of Arizona forest and resulted in an estimated $8m worth of damage.
All that’s just a small snapshot of the manslaughter and mayhem unleashed by gender reveal parties over the last couple of years. And that’s before you factor in the latest nightmare ignited by the terrible trend: the El Dorado fire in California. The fire, which was caused by a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” set off at a gender reveal party, has burned more than 13,000 acres of forest so far and prompted the evacuation of 3,000 residents.
It’s worth pausing here for a moment to fully absorb the fact that, as well as resulting in a woman’s death, gender reveal parties have destroyed at least 60,000 acres of land in the last three years. (To put this in perspective, the area of Manhattan is around 14,600 acres.) We all know that the police are fond of a bit of profiling; based on these statistics alone they ought to be implementing stop-and-frisk tactics on all heterosexual couples who come within five miles of a heavily wooded area. If the woman’s got a baby bump and the man’s got a dad bod then law enforcement should search them for explosives, stat.
Gender reveal parties are harmful in so many ways – why do we treat them as quirky?