VIDEO: Gender Reveal Flare Almost Blows Off Dad's Nuts
Congratulations, whoever you are! It's a boy! Wow. Who could've ever imagined it would be a boy. This was well worth putting exploding cannisters of blue powder on either side of your daughter's head and blowing your balls off. Assuming you didn't also disrupt the poor kid just trying to get some peace and quiet while gestating in the womb, enjoy this boy because he'll probably be your last baby. But hey, at least you didn't set fire to millions of acres of precious forest, right?
I'd say if there's one way to demonstrate the way the culture has changed from my father's generation through mine to today, there can be no more perfect example than The Gender Reveal Party.
Not just that they didn't exist before a few years ago. It goes way beyond that. Down almost to the molecular level. These things are the result of a level of narcissism that simply did not exist in the analog age that stretched from discovery of fire to the invention of Instagram. Having a virtual life has done the impossible: Fundamentally changed human nature. Or, at the very least, it's brought out a part of our nature that lay dormant since the day we came down out of the trees. And I don't think it's ever going to go back to the way it was.
Ten years from now, no one will understand how parents-to-be used to announce things like the fact they were pregnant or the gender of their child pre-social media. They'll have no clue. They'll have to Google it to find out that say, my dad sat home watching his first four kids until my mom called from the hospital to say all their dreams had finally come true because the cutest, sweetest, smartest one was born and she was naming him Jerry. Or how in one generation between him and me, the idea of a dad being in the delivery room went from unthinkable to mandatory. And how, in the 20 years since I retired from the baby-making business, it went from calling your loved ones to tell them about their newest family member and then going out for beers and cigars with your closest friends to a big, attention-seeking, grandiose party where you almost blow nads off. Along with your daughter's head.
Allow me to say something to the Gender Reveal Generation that apparently their friends and family are too polite to tell them:
No one cares.
Seriously. We do. Not. Care. And hopefully science is working on newer, better ways for us to not care. Unless you're having fertility problems, getting pregnant is not an accomplishment. Have a baby with one X-chromosome vs. two X-chromosomes is not a rare occurrence that needs to be celebrated like you broke the 100 meter dash record or created a Covid vaccine. You had a 50/50 shot at both genders and you hit on one of them. Congratu-goddamned-lations. Post it on Facebook instead of taking up a whole day of your friends' lives when they could be golfing or home getting stuff done.
Instead of sparing everyone you claim to care about your own attention-whoring self-aggrandizement, you now subject them to what is basically an obligation. Like a second baby shower, when one is already too many. Worse, once you go to one in a circle of friends, then you have to go to everyone's. And it becomes this endless cycle. A perpetual motion machine of having to act surprised by the result of nature's great genetic coin flip.
I'm making it one of my life's goals to go cradle-to-grave without ever having witnessed one of these ridiculous exercises in self-involved egomania. But I don't feel sorry for anyone who does. You Millennials brought this on yourselves.