A fire requires three elements: oxygen, fuel, and a spark. Sometimes, the oxygen is Instagram, and the spark is a “gender reveal party.”
At the Eldorado Ranch Park on a late-summer Saturday, parents who wanted a spectacular way to learn and announce the sex of their in utero child set off a smoke bomb with colored smoke, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Immediately, dried vegetation ignited, and soon, more than 8,000 acres had caught fire.
The same thing happened in Arizona in 2017, when an off-duty Border Patrol agent set up an explosive target in dry brush. He then shot the target, which exploded with blue smoke, and instantly caused a huge fire, which would burn 47,000 acres and cause $8 million in damage.
Before we get into the lack of risk-benefit calculus by the parents, we need to ask why gender reveals became a thing. Folks in their 20s and 30s have enough to go to, pointed out Rosie Gray, a reporter for BuzzFeed: “I’ll go to your engagement party, bachelorette, wedding shower, wedding, and baby shower, but asking me to come to another event is too much.”
Maybe the problem is that overscheduled, overprogrammed, insufficiently spontaneous millennials need an official occasion in order to get together — and so, they stretch every major life occurrence into as many themed, must-attend events as possible.
Perhaps it’s the lack of major life occurrences. Millennials and people of Generation Z get married less than their elders did, and they have fewer children than their elders did. If you’re only going to have 1.77 children, you may want to throw as many parties as possible whenever it happens.
Social media gives oxygen to all this. While both the California and Arizona gender-reveal explosions had live crowds of friends and family, Facebook and Instagram create incentives for ordinary adults to host visually arresting events. Cutting open a cake might be exciting for the people in the room, but it doesn’t ‘gram as well.
Celebrities on TikTok and YouTube have thrown lavish gender reveals. One Canadian woman named Inanna Sarkis, with 3.8 million YouTube subscribers, had the father spin the wheels of an Aston Martin over packets of pink-colored powder for everyone to learn she was expecting a girl. (Gender reveals typically involve the OB-GYN telling only one friend who plans the event.)
TikTok, where users make brief videos, is full of gender reveals that include punting exploding footballs, soccer penalty kicks, baseball swings, fireworks, and smashed guitars.
In those videos, all the world learns the gender. For the reveal that started the El Dorado fire, however, the world might have to wait a few months to learn if it’s a boy or a girl, as the police who reviewed the videos didn’t reveal the color.
