We live in increasingly gender fluid times, yet events to announce the sex of an unborn baby – with pink and blue smoke or sickly cupcakes – are on the rise. How did we get here?
A couple recently set fire to 47,000 acres of southern Arizona, at a cost of $8m (£6.3m), what with firefighting and whatnot, but it wasn’t with a barbecue gone wrong or a candle, or any of those things that could happen to any of us. They razed their environs to the ground by shooting at a target full of coloured explosive as a means of announcing the gender of their forthcoming baby. This is exactly the kind of thing – recklessness and pointlessness vying to define it – you would expect a gender-revealing parent-to-be to do.
In Australia, the main high-risk behaviour associated with the gender-reveal event is called the “burnout”, where you somehow – the technicalities escape me – send plumes of blue or pink smoke out of the back of your vehicle. Here in the UK, we have adapted to the new normal with cake: blue and pink iced muffins with swirling question marks, which all solidifies at some point into the answer, sometimes via a larger cake. Like the baby shower at which it typically occurs, this practice is deeply alien to the British; we have only adopted it because we heard there were baked goods involved.
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