The Brief: After an explosive gender reveal started a wildfire, people are making memes about the dangers of such celebrations.

Bluesquiggle
DEEP DIVE

After a gender reveal ended about as badly as one could: with a 10,000+ acre wildfire, people have been adding some levity to the situation via memes. The El Dorado Fire in Southern California’s San Bernadino County has burned over 10,000 acres so far and was traced back to a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” that was used for a gender reveal. Footage of the incident hasn’t yet been made public, but the device went off in a dry and grassy area during a heatwave (and a time where climate change exacerbates the risk of wildfires). Be sure to add this to your 2020 bingo card.

Gender reveal parties have wreaked similar havoc before, starting wildfires, and even killing a family member.

Memes about this most recent wildfire-causing gender reveal catastrophe both criticize the callousness of those who use explosive devices in their gender announcements and critique people’s obsession with announcing the sex of their unborn babies. Jenna Karvunidis, who popularized the gender reveal party in 2008 (hers consisted of cutting a cake), has since denounced the concept and the dangerous ways in which people reveal their fetuses’ genders. In response to the El Dorado Fire, she wrote on Facebook: “Stop it. Stop having these stupid parties. For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis. No one cares but you.” Many gender reveal wildfire memes take shots at cis-normativity, noting how, in this case, the gender binary sparked a literal disaster.

Why do people do this from memes