The New York Times Magazine - 04.08.2019

8 8.4.

Face: Evan Kafka/Getty Images. Legs: Getty Images. Opening page: Screen grab from Twitter.

Screenland

Photo illustration by Mike McQuade

recently, expectant parents received
this information without much fanfare
during a routine ultrasound, or perhaps
by phone, when a doctor called to relay
amniocentesis results. But around a
decade ago, people started passing the
results, under seal, to obliging bakers,
who would bake pink or blue cakes,
conceal them in neutral- colored frosting
and then deliver them to be cut open
at a party in front of friends and family.
The ‘‘reveal’’ allowed the parents to be
surprised in public, record the moment
for posterity and share it across social
platforms, signaling which aggregation
of gender norms and limitations friends
and family were to immediately begin
heaping on the fetus’s soft- skulled head.

Performative happiness, of course, is

fueled by one- upsmanship. As extrava-

gant as the cake reveal seemed at fi rst,

it quickly became commonplace. And

so the reveals began to escalate — into

spectacular feats, outlandish props and

pyrotechnic displays, like a Super Bowl

halftime show of gender expectations.

No wonder, then, that these stunts go

most viral when they go most spectac-

ularly wrong. The most recent example

involves a black car on a rural road on

Australia’s Gold Coast, drifting slowly,

spinning its wheels, pumping out billow-

ing clouds of powder- blue smoke. Figures

jog alongside it, making videos with their

phones; a drone hovers overhead, cap-

turing the offi cial record of the moment.

And then, in the course of what looks like

a celebratory doughnut, the car bursts

into fl ames. The fi gures surrounding it

begin dashing around in a panic. The

driver — who will later be convicted of

dangerous driving — leaps out and fl ees.

Even the drone shoots up and away.

The ‘‘burnout’’ gender reveal is appar-

ently big in Australia; last year, another

car burst into fl ames while announcing a

girl. Gender reveals play with fi re — quite

literally. In what is surely the most infa-

mous announcement of all time, a Cus-

toms and Border Protection agent start-

ed a 47,000- acre wildfi re in Arizona with

his color- coded explosives, causing more

than $8 million in damage and turning

an inconsequential private moment into

This is the

gender reveal

in its baroque

phase.