Gender reveals have exploded in popularity over the last decade. (We blame social media.) What used to be a private moment between expecting parents and their OB-GYNs is now available for everyone to see—friends, family, and judgmental strangers, bored and scrolling through Facebook and Instagram.
Now we’ve seen a lot of gender reveals in our day—the guy who used an alligator for a gender reveal party, the balloon that floated away before the parents could pop it, the one that caused a 47,000 acre wildfire and $8 million worth of damage—but we can safely say we’ve never seen anything like this:
A dad wearing a blue T-shirt holds a baby doll in a diaper in front of the expecting mom in pink. Their friends and family, surround them; you can hear them cheer, “Come on, open it!” “Rip the diaper off!”
When the mom eventually peels the diaper off, a huge, not-true-to-any-baby’s-life-sized penis bobs out as the father screams. And his screams… y’all, his screams are somewhere between “You get a car!” hysteria and “The killer is right behind me, isn’t he?”
We have so many questions:
Since gender reveals are often the first time parents are learning of their baby’s assigned-at-birth sex, who did this? Did the parents ask for this? Is this a thing people do for gender reveals?
And why is the lady in the blue dress stroking the doll’s penis? Can we stop sexualizing babies? Could they not think of anything else to represent “Black boy”? And does the mom look upset because she wanted a girl, or because her gender reveal centered around a huge penis? (it could be both.)
Whether you think gender reveals are a fun part of celebrating a baby’s arrival, an extreme display of vanity, or an outdated performance that confuses gender and sex, we can all agree that this is the most ridiculous gender reveal we’ve ever seen.
