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The blue smoke reveals the sex of an unborn baby - and may set a few acres on fire
Photo by US Forest Service / AP
What a time to be alive!
We live in a time when people can be so excited about the beautiful circumstance of becoming parents that they accidentally burn half the American forest while sharing their private happiness.
What global warming cannot do, fathers and mothers-to-be with too much Internet access can do: since last week, alongside all the other forest fires, one triggered by a smoke-generating device at a so-called "Gender Reveal Party" has raged in California - a celebration at which The gender of the expected baby is revealed with all sorts of effort and celebrated with various blue or pink signals. The "El Dorado Fire" kindled by such a party on September 7th destroyed thousands of hectares of nature, numerous Californians had to leave their homes and apartments.
Samira El Ouassil Right Arrow
Photo: Stefan Klüter
Born in Munich in 1984, is an actress and author.
In 2016 her book "The 100 most important things" (with Timon Kaleyta and Martin Schlesinger) was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
In 2009 she was the candidate for chancellor of the PARTY, which at that time was not admitted to the federal election.
She was recently awarded the Bert Donnepp Prize for media journalism for her media critical column "Wochenschau" (uebermedien.de).
And not only that Gender Reveal Parties are currently
a thing
, no, forest fires that are caused by Gender Reveal Parties are now becoming a
thing
.
In 2017 there was already a conflagration in Arizona, which went down in the history books as the "Sawmill Fire" and which was also solemnly fired by a blue-colored sex proclamation bomb.
In this case, you can see in real time how the fire starts in a video recording: The father-to-be shoots a gun from off at a pyrotechnic device to release the smoke, the color of which should announce the gender: Will it be a boy?
Will it be a girl
It became a weeklong fire that stretched over 180 square kilometers, employed 800 firefighters, and cost the shooter eight million dollars.
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The "El Dorado" fire
Photo: Kyle Grillot / The Washington Post / Getty Images
In general, the escalation of these parties is also
a thing
: Here it was thought that the message to the world that your own offspring will have a penis should definitely involve a living crocodile.
And cars that go up in flames when the pink or blue smoke is emitted have become a sub-genre of failed gender reveal parties.
Escalation can also mean exorbitant: In Dubai, the Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper in the city, was bathed in blue light last Wednesday;
a marketing campaign for the building in cooperation with a prominent influencer couple.
The audience burst into tears overwhelmed by the megalomaniac phallus performance.
A baby blue skyscraper - more prenatal virility has never been ascribed to an unborn child.
In order to be able to do justice to this masculinity advance at all, the boy would have to explain to his mother how best to give birth to him.
With all my amazement at the destructive side effects, I definitely don't want to drift into worn-out anti-Americanism - on the one hand, because I'm sure that it is only a matter of time before the relatively harmless gender reveal parties in our country have a similar social one Take on importance such as Halloween.
And on the other hand, because we don't have to hide ourselves with our annual frenzy on New Year's Eve in the discipline of the "stupid and most spectacular form of self-amputation".
We haven't started a fire in the Austrian deciduous forest that Trump so admired, but at least we have already successfully destroyed an entire monkey house with Chinese sky lights and killed 30 animals in the process.
Over-ambitious parents with offspring narcissism
If the legend is to be believed, gender reveal parties have been held for eleven years and are almost folklore in Internet times.
We owe the fact that this custom quickly became a matter of course in society and internet culture thanks to network
dynamic
effects, every sensational presentation and blazing performance, and the above-average
instagrammable
and grateful YouTube content
are rewarded with reach.
The algorithm loves overambitious parents who gratefully upload their offspring narcissism into the gears of a colorful attention economy.
This is probably also the reason why the first gender reveal parties have developed from slicing the bland cake - if it is filled with strawberry cream, it will be a girl - to superbow-like live stream pyro spectacles of a bold underlined heteronormativity.
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The Consequences of a Gender Reveal Party in California
Photo:
Ringo HW Chiu / AP
Blogger Jenna Karvunidis is considered the involuntary inventor of this trend, who published the first gender cake at the time and informed the Internet that she was expecting a daughter.
Plot twist no. 1:
Karvunidis has been running a campaign for a year to discourage people from celebrating such parties because their perception of gender has changed - apart from the fact that they can also be very dangerous.
Plot Twist No. 2:
Your daughter, who is now 11 years old, the baby whose gender was revealed at the first Gender Reveal Party on the Internet with the help of a pink cake cream filling, today wears suits, short hair and, according to her mother, does not behave according to the gender stereotypes assigned to her .
Apparent duality in an ambiguous world
With their rampant kitsch, the parties are a consistent product of our time.
Many of their variants look like children's birthdays for parents.
The apparently apparent duality is celebrated in a world in which gender, gender identity and gender attribution are no longer so clear and no longer want to be.
The Gender Reveal Party is perhaps the last place where a practical disambiguation of the world can not only be staged, but also celebrated without questioning.
A few more blue and pink smoke grenades are quickly thrown into the ambiguous present, before one's own child could cause disorder with a multi-layered identity that is not defined by gender characteristics.
Perhaps that's why they seem out of date: where gender asterisks and gender quotas are discussed and non-binarity and trans identities are talked about, where we constantly encourage ourselves to cultivate differentiations, cultivate ambivalences, perceive shades of gray, trudge off Gender animated parents with the carelessness of party guests throwing confetti into reality and draw them in black and white or blue and pink.
And unintentionally ignite them.
Icon: The mirror