The new trend for ‘gender reveal’ parties sums up the mood of the past decade

OMG, the end of the decade is almost here, which means it’s time to start reflecting on what on earth has been going on. Yes, there was #Brexit and #Trump, but I’d like to suggest an alternative story which I feel also captures the prevailing mood of the past ten years.

It is about a party that went wrong. Badly wrong. In October, a couple in Iowa set about celebrating the imminent arrival of their baby with what is known as a ‘gender reveal party’. They welded a metal cylinder to a stand, packed it full of coloured powder and gunpowder, taped over the top and detonated it.

They’d used explosives in the hope of making a dramatic video for social media of the powder being sprayed into the air, which would announce the gender of their baby. Instead, the device exploded like a pipe bomb, killing a family member who was standing nearby. It eventually landed more than 100 metres away in a field.

The tale sums up for me what the past decade has really been about: a never–ending quest for likes on social media, often resulting in disaster. Instagram launched in 2010, and ten years on, we are starting to understand what the world looks like when we decide to live out our lives in front of an insatiable audience. The answer is: pretty mad.

Parenting websites claim that the theatrical gender reveal ritual helps you ‘cope with the stress’ of having a baby. To that I say: pull the other one. Revealing a baby’s gender is just high-value social media content, as any influencer knows.

The first gender reveal party took place in America — where else? — back in 2008, when a woman called Jenna Myers Karvunidis, who once baked a cake to celebrate her goldfish’s birthday, threw a party to reveal her baby’s sex.