Just a bomb party, officer
Why do people insist on being so stupid? (And destructive and reckless and neighbor-teasing?)
A New Hampshire family’s gender reveal party was such a blast that it set off reports of an earthquake, and could be heard from across the state line, police said.
Police in Kingston, a town not far from the Massachusetts border, received reports of a loud explosion Tuesday evening. They responded to Torromeo quarry where they found people who acknowledged holding a gender reveal party with explosives.
Stop with the farking “gender reveal” parties. Or have friends over for dinner if you like, but leave it at that.
One “gender reveal party” set off a wildfire during wildfire season near LA last summer. Smart move.
The source of the blast was 80 pounds (36 kilograms) of Tannerite, police said. The family thought the quarry would be the safest spot to light the explosive, which is typically sold over the counter as a target for firearms practice, police said.
The safest spot would be nowhere. Put the explosives down, turn around, and go home. Stay there.
Some people’s houses had cracks in their foundations after the blast.
In March, two pilots were killed when their plane crashed into the waters off Cancun while it was streaming a pink substance as part of a gender reveal, Fox News reported.
Good reason to die. Sensible.
In 2020, smoke-generating pyrotechnic device used as part of a California gender reveal party caused a fire that damaged more than 7,000 acres (2,800 hectares) of land. In April 2017, an off-duty US border patrol agent, Dennis Dickey, caused $8m of damage to 19,000 hectares (47,000 acres) of Arizona forest when he shot at a target full of blue-coloured explosive as a means of announcing the gender of his unborn child.
People don’t half think they’re important, do they.
What is the appropriate explosive hue for a non-binary gender reveal?
Asking for a friend.
They can make rainbow-hued fireworks these days!
Actually, though, it might be invisible smoke and a silent explosion, because we may not be able to comprehend the special “non binary gender” at hand. After all, there are dozens of genders, many of which we cannot comprehend at this unenlightened time!
No, what they think is the core, principal factor that makes that child who and what it is, its very being and basic humanity, the sine non qua of existence, the most important important thing of all — is whether it’s a boy — or a girl.
I’d like to ban all gender-reveal parties not just for the safety of the community, but the collective mental health of it, too.
80 pounds???
That’s a lot of BOOM BOOM.
(Insert joke about adult supervision.)
A former friend, heavily into trans ideology, who became a father not long before breaking contact with me over gender issues, had a gender reveal party with a cake that said “gender is a social construct”. I have no idea what he had inside the cake. I might have hoped it said “my child will be a … CHILD! No such thing as boy clothes or girl toys! Get whatever you like!”, but the trans ideology mavens are anything but logically consistent on these matters.
My moggy will shortly be having kittens, and of course they will each fall into one of the 7 (and counting) familiar gender classes: 1. straight male; 2. straight female; 3. birth-assigned male but identifying as female; 4. birth-assigned female but identifying as male; 5. born cats but identifying as (insert name of species here) ; 6. born cats but constantly yowling (in cat language, in which I am fluent): “stop this bus. I want to get off.” 7. other.
When did this become a thing? Presumably since ultrasound began to be used to detect the sex. It’s really odd. Once having a girl rather than a boy could be a disaster for economic/family name/dowry/wedding payment/macho pride reasons. Within in living memory in Western societies fathers were commiserated for a girl rather than a boy. However as there are no longer these reasons, why on earth is the “gender reveal” such a big deal?
To expand upon KBPlayer’s question:
When did BLOWING SHIT UP become such an integral part of “gender reveal” parties?!
Tannerite is an insane invention to begin with. It supposedly requires an impact like a bullet to detonate; hammer-blows, electricity, or fuses won’t do. So it’s only used for exploding targets. That would be less than an ounce at a time. But these…mooks collected 80 POUNDS of the stuff?
And when did the “gender reveal” become something everyone else is supposed to get excited about too? It’s going to be one or the other; which one will be known in a few months; why are other people supposed to gather to hear that it’s B not A or A not B?
I see them as a vague excuse for a party, not a major event. Like a small child’s birthday party, it really isn’t about the child, it’s a party for everyone else.
Come to think of it, a lot of parties strike me that way, which is one reason I don’t go to parties very often.
You may be understating the pervasiveness of the ‘reasons’. A lot of people still want a boy first, or a boy if they’re only having one. It may be less stated now, but a lot of people (at least around here) will admit it. I have done some informal surveys of different groups of people (not random, you know, so I would never apply them outside the people that they fit), and every time, I come up with a strong, nearly 75%, preference for a male.
And I suspect the other reason is the pervasive gendering of the child that has become so intensified in recent years, so you won’t accidentally send blue booties for a female child, or pink for a boy. (I usually just gave yellow; it’s a good, neutral color.)
I had my two kids in the early 80’s, which was just before learning your child’s sex before birth became easier and more popular. Moms my age “wanted to be surprised.” When it started to change, the most common reason we gave to each other was “I want to know what color to paint the nursery” or a similar variation. In other words, decorating.
Many years ago I read a book on the sudden uptake in “labor-saving devices” for housewives back in the early 1900s. The people (men) who created and promoted them saw their major selling point as adding leisure time for ordinary women. A vacuum or washing machine meant the wife could visit, read, go to concerts, join clubs, or volunteer for noble causes. It was like having a maid.
Instead, the ability to do chores more quickly resulted in higher standards of cleanliness. If doing the laundry didn’t take all day, then doing it every day instead of once a week meant you weren’t lazy. The space to be filled simply raised the level of measuring what was already there, and was filled with more of the same. The labor-saving devices ended up making more housework, not less. Human nature.
And it occurs to me that this may have happened when we suddenly began learning sex before birth. Names, then decorating, then more decorating, and clothes, and toys, and books — all more and more divided along the lines of sex. The opportunity to create a sex-based environment lead to increasing elaborations on that theme. Not just a pink wall, but a pink nursery; not just a pink nursery, but a pink sparkle princess castle playhouse nursery. And the little tiger got the same treatment, but with sports and planes. And slowly, over time, the “gender reveal” became more and more important.
And now we’re dealing with young people who insist that their “true” gender is what defines them as human, the very core of who and what they are.
The idea of decorating a child’s room according to sex is SO alien to me.
I’m surprised that the TRAs haven’t yet renamed them as ‘gender-assigning’ parties.
And how many of these “revealed genders” will turn out to be wrong? Hell, if doctors and midwives are just randomly “assigning” M or F at birth, how’s an ultrasound technician supposed to be able to figure out who’s what in utero? Is there a special setting on the equipment for detecting Gender Essence Magic that isn’t being used properly? How would one tell the difference between a malfunction of the machine (no reading) and Non-Binary? It sure would save people a lot of trouble in the long run if they got this sorted out.
So much of the current debate is fueled by words and language? I think, in this instance, part of this stems from the substitution of “gender” for “sex” out of a sense of politeness, prudery and modesty, with people trying their damnedest to avoid usage of the word employed to denote both the act and the biological category. “Sex reveal party” does sound a bit naughty. I think the euphemistic substitution of “gender” for “sex” has aided and abetted the conflation of gender and sex. Since many people were already using them interchangeably, activists were more easily able to pull a bait and switch between the two, with fewer people being aware. The deliberate cultivation and co-optation of that confusion by TAs was facilitated by pre-existing, imprecise usage conventions. Had the two terms been used more exclusively and distinctly, I believe TAs would have recieved more pushback and resistance to their initiatives. As it is, I still see too many people, in speaking up about the issue, use the word gender when, given the context, they really meansex, thus muddling up their own arguments and playing into the hands of TA talking points. There is more pushback evident in the resistance to the attempted near-universal erasure of the word “woman” in the interests of so-called “inclusive” language. The blatant dishonesty of this effort is made more obvious by the complete absense of a parallel drive, of comparable scope and vigour, to erase the use of the word “man” in the functionally equivalent contexts. Words and language may not constitute “literal violence,” but they are without doubt, important weapons in the current debate and struggle. Trans activism uses language to paper over an uncomfortable, recalcitrant reality, and to reify bullshit concepts beyond their load-bearing limit. Its indiscriminate crying of “transphobia” in response to gender critical views and inquiry is an attempt to unilaterally disarm the other side in this conflict.
OB@#10:
Normally, it is as with the toss of a coin. But I recall that one result I read about of Mao’s ‘one child’ policy in China was a huge surplus of male children due to imfanticide of females, leading a generation later to a noted increase in polyandry, with two or more men sharing the same wife; common also as I recall in Tibet.
What is the wife doing?
[…] a comment on Just a bomb party, […]
A damn sight more than she ought to be doing, and likely against her will, is my guess.
The “gender reveal party” was apparently invented in2008. The inventor now regrets the whole mess.
OB: What is the wife doing? (Present tense?)
In Mao’s China, I venture to say whatever she was told, and on pain of consequences otherwise. But the last time I looked, Chinese population growth was no longer exponential. Rapidly increasing individual wealth and less need for people to have lots of kids in the expectation of having someone there to look after them in their old age has, I think, made a lot of difference.
Omar – what I meant was that “two or more men sharing the same wife” is an odd way to put it, as if she were a garage or lawnmower or car or other big-ticket inanimate object that people can share. I wonder how this arrangement comes about, and how much violence and coercion and abuse of the “shared” woman is deployed.
OB: Polygamy is ‘the condition of having many or several spouses esp. wives, at one time.’ Subsets include polygyny ‘the practice or condition of having more than one wife at one time’ and polyandry: ‘the practice or condition of having more than one husband at one time.’ (Macquarie Dictionary.) In all cases it necessarily involves a person of a given sex sharing one or more spouses of the opposite sex with another person of the same sex. eg one husband with several wives, or conversely, one wife with several husbands.
Two women can share the same husband, and two men can share the same wife; the latter being not as common as the former. In a monogamous situation the wife can refer to the husband as ‘my (possessive case) husband, and likewise the husband can refer to the wife as ‘my (possessive case again) wife.’ Just as if the other spouse were a garage, lawnmower, car, or whatever. In a polygynous situation, the husband could refer to ‘my wives’ and in a polyandrous situation the wife could refer to ‘my husbands.’ The possessive case covers wives, husbands, friends, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, cars, garages, pianos, dogs, cats, horses etc etc with equal efficiency, and with no necessary value judgement involved. Those of any other persuasion can, and do, talk of ‘my partner’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygyny
Oh gosh, I didn’t know any of that.
Kidding. Yes I did. It’s beside the point.
OB:
I took your item at #23 at face value. As a rule, I never assume that my reality, education and experience is anyone else’s reality etc, and sometimes that doesn’t pay; as in this case. So two further questions: On a thread that starts off being about the inanity of ‘gender reveal’ parties and then proceeds to roam around a bit as all threads tend to do: 1. what is the ‘it’ that is “beside the point.” ? And 2. what is the ‘point’ that the ‘it’ is beside?
(Uncorks whisky flask in the hope that a good swig will aid clarity of thought on this subject.)
“The idea of decorating a child’s room according to sex is SO alien to me.”
Yeah – you can’t choose your gender, but when you’re older you can choose your own colour scheme, whether it’s girly pink with Beiber posters or gloomy Goth.
Omar @ 26 – your @24 is not a reply to my @23 – that’s how it’s beside the point.
OB: I disagree. But as you wish.
Ok I’ll try again. Your “two or more men sharing the same wife” is not the only possible way of putting it, and that way of putting it does treat the woman as a thing, that has no choice and no escape. It also makes it sound more banal and comfortable than it’s likely to be in reality. I’ve read somewhere (I forget where) that the sex imbalance has triggered a lot of violence in India, because there are all these incel men running around coercing women. It’s not a sweet bucolic situation where two men run the farm and the woman just lies there. Those women being “shared” probably don’t want to be “shared” and are there because they’re not allowed to escape.
My “two or more men sharing the same wife” was an attempt at a brief summary of the situation in polyandry; nothing more. Nor can I find in my comments above anything which IMHO could be interpreted as a portrayal on my part of some “sweet bucolic situation where two men run the farm and the woman just lies there.”
As someone born without any by-your-leave as a member of the male persuasion, I believe that I cannot ever be a feminist: only at best a feminist sympathiser- albeit one given at times to treading a bit less than warily, and straying dangerously close to what some incline to regard as political incorrectness: present company excepted of course.
Wikipedia IMHO has excellent articles on polyandry and polygyny. (See links below.)
From the Polyandry article: “Polyandry is believed to be more likely in societies with scarce environmental resources. It is believed to limit human population growth and enhance child survival. It is a rare form of marriage that exists not only among peasant families but also among the elite families. For example, polyandry in the Himalayan mountains is related to the scarcity of land. The marriage of all brothers in a family to the same wife allows family land to remain intact and undivided. If every brother married separately and had children, family land would be split into unsustainable small plots. In contrast, very poor persons not owning land were less likely to practice polyandry in Buddhist Ladakh and Zanskar. In Europe, the splitting up of land was prevented through the social practice of impartible inheritance. With most siblings disinherited, many of them became celibate monks and priests.”
From the Polygyny one:
“Polygyny is more widespread in Africa than in any other continent. Some scholars see the slave trade’s impact on the male-to-female sex ratio as a key factor in the emergence and fortification of polygynous practices in regions of Africa. Generally in rural areas with growing populations, the higher the incidence of polygyny, the greater the delay of first marriage for young men…The higher the average polygyny rate, the greater the element of gerontocracy and social stratification.
“Throughout the African polygyny belt stretching from Senegal in the west to Tanzania in the east, as many as a third to a half of married women are in polygynous unions, and polygyny is found especially in West Africa. Historically, polygyny was partly accepted in ancient Hebrew society, in classical China, and in sporadic traditional Native American, African and Polynesian cultures. In the Indian subcontinent, it was known to have been practiced during ancient times. It was accepted in ancient Greece, until the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church.
“In North America, polygyny is practiced by some Mormon sects, such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”
Polygyny I think can be seen as one of the trappings of feudalism or of oriental despotism. It has clearly fallen out of favour in post-feudal societies. Males and females of most if not all animal species have arguably different reproductive strategies, and suites of behaviours to match.
References in originals removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygyny