Gender Reveals A Social

Phenomenon

Valene Wood

Winter 2013

English 391, section 1

Jill Terry Rudy

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Table of Contents

3 Cover Essay

16 Works Cited

17 Autobiographical Sketch

69 Consent Forms

Items

19 Item 1 Ashley Cleveland

26 Item 2 Genet Jones

30 Item 3 Genet Jones’s friend

34 Item 4 Heather Bailey

39 Item 5 Jesica Matsuoka

44 Item 6 Madeline McNeil’s friend

49 Item 7 Madeline McNeil

52 Item 8 Adrienne Church

55 Item 9 Megan Doxey

60 Item 10 Marianne Meehan

66 Item 11 Valene Wood

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Gender Reveals: A Social Phenomenon

The time has finally come. Ashley Cleveland is anxious to hear the gender of her

unborn baby; yet, when the ultrasound technician determines the gender, she writes the

announcement on a piece of paper and seals it in an envelope without saying a word to

the soon-to-be parents. Ashley and her husband take this precious envelope to Ashley’s

friend who prepares for their gender reveal. The couple gathers with family, friends,

and a photographer out on their porch with a large box between them. Then, when

everyone is ready, they open the box. A bundle of pink balloons float out, the camera

snaps, the crowd cheers and screams. They all find out at the same time that—it’s a girl!

Although this series of events seems out of the norm, it is becoming increasingly

popular among new mothers. Online conversation about what is becoming known as

the “gender reveal” has spiked over the past couple years. The days of a simple phone

call to close friends and family are quickly vanishing as people are coming up with

more creative and elaborate ways to announce the gender of their future child.

In this study I wanted to capture a sample of this new trend and explore the

causes of its sudden popularity. First in my paper, I will discuss the past of baby gender

reveals and how advancements in technology have made the gender reveal as it is

today possible and desirable. Second, I will display the variety and individuality found

in gender reveals and how they are both similar but different from each other using the

twin laws of folklore. Lastly, I will discuss the causes of the trend and people’s opinions

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of it. I will explore how this new trend fits snuggly into folklore, fulfilling all three of

the keys of folklore: problem solving, aesthetic creativity, and group values.

A Guessing Game: The History of Gender Reveals

Gender reveals are new enough that it is difficult to find scholarly sources

discussing them. In the Wilson Folklore Archives at Brigham Young University the

closest studies that have been recorded are about traditional gender determining

traditions. These methods, such as dangling the pregnant woman’s wedding ring from

one of her hairs to see which way it will spin or looking on the Chinese birth chart, have

been used for generations (Castro 2).

Although these prediction methods are still in use, ultrasound technology has

developed over the years to the point of being capable of discovering the gender of your

unborn child as early as 12 weeks into the pregnancy. Ultrasounds are becoming more

and more dependable, and more and more detailed, to the point where a good majority

of new parents are discovering the gender of their baby well before birth. No more

guessing is needed and fewer and fewer couples are waiting until birth to discover the

gender of their child.

During my studies I interviewed several young mothers, Ashley Cleveland from

the beginning of my paper being one of them (Item 1), about their experience with

gender reveals. Another one of my informants is Genet Jones, a mother pregnant with

her third child who has decided not to find out the gender of her baby before birth. She

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suggests, “When the discovery of a newborn child’s gender [is] moved from the already

intensely powerful moment of birth to a standard office visit and an impersonal

sonogram screen, people keenly felt the lack of ritual and of proper acknowledgment

that something of lifelong importance was being revealed” (Item 2). Is it possible that

although technology allows us to better plan for our future child, it takes away some of

the power of discovering the baby’s identity at birth? As technology has progressed and

we no longer have the fun and anticipation of guessing, gender reveals may have

developed as a way to keep the power and excitement in the moment.

Boy or Girl? Examples of Gender Reveals

There is no set way to do a gender reveal. Each is individual and creative in its

own right although there are definite similarities. Aesthetic creativity is one of the

elements of folklore that can clearly be found within this sample of culture. According

to Michael Owen Jones, aesthetic creativity has “been enlarged to include personal

experience narratives, celebrations and festive events, and examples of art at work”

(148). Gender reveals have been produced as examples of all three.

Some gender reveals come in heavy narrative format; especially those in blogs.

Mothers especially like to dramatize the event by describing every moment of their visit

to the doctor and the announcement of their baby’s gender, remembering to include

their own and their husband’s reactions. Blogs are a very popular means of announcing

gender reveals. Sometimes the gender reveal is done directly on the blog, sometimes

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people just blog about the gender reveals they did elsewhere. Gender reveals are also

narrated in text messages. Megan Doxey revealed that she was having a boy to her close

family and friends this way:

Yeah, we like…we like called immediate family, kinda thing, we actually we like

sent a text out, we were like ‘Went to the doctor’s, it went great and nuh nuh nuh

and we found out it’s a…’ and then we didn’t send the rest…and so everybody

like text us, ‘it’s a what?!’ and so we called them and told them what it was. We

were like ‘It’s a boy!’ (Item 9)

Megan used a traditional narrative to do her reveal, using suspense to make it special

and exciting.

Most gender reveals, if they have a physical form, are a celebration of some sorts

usually involving close family and friends. This is something that has carried on from

the older tradition of gender predictions. Marilee Castro reported in her study of gender

predictions that “often, while curiosity of the sex of a new baby is great for parents, it is

the neighbors, co-workers, family, and friends that actually become involved and

perform the gender predictions” (2). In all of the items I collected, the gender reveal was

involving, or directly for, close family and friends. Jesica Matsuoka lives in Hawaii far

from her family and so did an online gender reveal specifically so she could share the

moment with family and friends who lived in the continental states (Item 5). Even

though Ashley Cleveland posted her balloon reveal in picture form online, she still had

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her parents there when they released the pink balloons out of the box (Item 1). Sharing

this moment with family and friends is still clearly a part of the culture.

Some people have taken the celebration part of gender reveals to the extreme,

creating what are called gender reveal parties. These usually have a large guest list and

are neutral color themed (yellow, green, purple, etc.) or they are heavily blue and pink.

Jessica Wilcox threw a girls-versus-boys party with games, pink and blue colored

refreshments, a tally board for guesses, and pins to designate whose side everyone was

on. During these parties there is always a moment when the gender is revealed. Jessica

did hers by breaking upon a lantern that had colored paper in it (Wilcox). Others, like

Genet Jones’s friend Janie, order a cake to make the reveal. They had the gender hidden

in an envelope and they gave it to a baker who put the corresponding frosting inside

the cake so when the couple cut it open, they found out the gender at the same time

their family did (Item 3).

Gender reveals are also an example of artwork. Many gender reveals involve

photography or some other type of crafty idea. Jesica Matsuoka’s reveal was a photo

shoot where they created their own backdrop out of chalk. They then posted that photo

on Facebook (Item 5). Heather Bailey made a t-shirt decorated with a personalized

Spiderman song that her husband wore to announce it to her in-laws (Item 4). Each

gender reveal is very personalized. Even if they got the idea from somewhere else,

everyone seems to put their own twist on it, making it their own.

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Gender reveals come in many shapes and sizes but they have definite

similarities, following the twin laws of folklore—repetition and variation. A repeated

element is that all gender reveals use the colors pink and blue to do their reveal; pink

being for girls and blue for boys. This distinction has not always been traditional and

has only recently become an accepted social gender code. For most of the nineteenth

century, baby clothing was white because it could be easily cleaned and bleached, as

well as its representing purity and innocence. According to Jo B. Paoletti, “pink-blue

gender coding was known in the 1860s but was not dominant until the 1950s in most

parts of the United States and not universal until a generation later” (89). Today finding

gender neutral baby clothing is very difficult. In our interview, Marianne Meehan

expressed her frustration while trying to find gender neutral baby shoes for her

pregnancy announcement. She said it was becoming ridiculous, which is why she

ended up saving the idea and using it for the gender reveal (Item 10). The colors blue

and pink have become so entrenched in our culture that it is near impossible to find just

baby clothes—all you can find are baby girl clothes and baby boy clothes.

Another repetition found in the collections was that they all reflect the

personality of the parents in some way or another and heavily involve family and

friends. As discussed earlier, family and friends have always been very closely

connected to gender predictions. It makes sense that this would carry over into gender

reveals. All of the gender reveals were either shared first with close family and friends

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or made specifically for family and friends. Even though gender reveals have become so

public, this element reveals a sense of intimacy that has remained.

Also, even though ultrasounds have taken the suspense out of knowing the

gender of the baby at birth, a key, repeated element of gender reveals is a high level of

anticipation, followed by a revelation of some sort. Parents seem to like to keep the

surprise element in the reveal. Even if the parents already know and they’re just

revealing it to others, like Heather Bailey’s t-shirt example, it is still done to create an

unexpected, unpredictable surprise.

The other twin law of folklore is variation. A significant element of variation is

found in the mediums the parents use. Some parents use photography, some use cakes,

and others use clever cards or words. There is no limit to their creativity as long as they

follow the basic repeated elements discussed above. There are some definite repetitions

in the use of some mediums—for example, the cakes or balloons—as people mimic

ideas they saw friends do or they found online, but no reveal is exactly the same.

The motivation for their methods also varies. Although there are some overlaps

within these methods, some do a reveal for attention, some do it for pure fun, others do

it for practical reasons so as to be able to include everyone in the special moment when

they’re otherwise too far away. Even though most people will not admit that they are

doing a gender reveal to get attention, what people in general don’t seem to recognize is

that everything we do on social media is to get attention. We want likes, comments,

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shares, and people to notice us. This is one of the possible reasons behind gender

reveals developing in the first place—it is another way to gain online attention.

Who’s to Blame?

Although the trend is still new enough that not everyone has heard about it,

many young married women who are connected socially through the internet are

familiar with the idea. Everyone that I spoke to attributed social media websites or

blogs for the birthing of this new celebration. C. Weaver and B. B. Morrison in their

article on social networking said,

Since the explosion of the Internet age, more than 1 billion people have become

connected to the World Wide Web, creating seemingly limitless opportunities for

communication and collaboration. In the context of today’s electronic media,

social networking has come to mean individuals using the Internet and Web

applications to communicate in previously impossible ways. (97)

Today people are able to stay connected through a variety of ways. The three that came

up most in my research were Pinterest, Facebook, and blogs. Pinterest was the number

one site people blamed for the spreading of this new trend. One of my informants,

Ashley Cleveland, said of her gender reveal, “I actually saw something similar on

Pinterest and developed my own idea off of that” (Item 1). Since its establishment in

2010, Pinterest has been growing in popularity, especially among women, and is a

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source of many do-it-yourself (DIY) projects and ideas. This is where I first came into

contact with the idea of a gender reveal as well.

Facebook, established in 2004, is a social media site that has been around a bit

longer than Pinterest and has a much further reach and many more users. Adrienne

Church explains her opinion of how Facebook perpetuates gender reveals, saying,

[…] just having a status on Facebook is still a gender reveal but it’s funny

because you see, like, you put a status about whether you’re having a boy or a

girl and you’ll have like, you know, a third of your friends will like it, it’s not

even that it’s like a big deal or anything but, I mean it is a big deal but it’s like, it’s

just common knowledge that if you see any sort of a pregnancy announcements

practically on Facebook, you like it, whether or not you’re good friends with

them or not. […] it’s just such a huge thing in our culture and I think that social

media also just booms it because it’s just like, it’s a way that you can mass

announce things. (Item 8)

On Facebook you usually post something because you’re looking for “likes.” You want

people to acknowledge you. In many ways it gives credit to those that think gender

announcements are just a way of drawing attention to yourself. But, others like Jesica

Matsuoka (Item 5), used Facebook because it was the quickest, easiest way to get the

news out to all their friends.

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Blogs are also a very popular way to do gender reveals. They are available to

everyone and take little computer skills to set one up. A couple of my samples were

found from blogs and their posting pictures and stories about their gender reveal. Alma

McGinn said in her folklore project about blogging that, “I am collecting the stories of

my life that I feel are noteworthy and I also can receive positive feedback from family

and friends when I post them” (7). Most blogs, it seems, are made initially for the

purpose of keeping family and friends updated on their lives, but many blogs go viral

and spread until enough people read their blogs that they have advertisers asking for

space on their sites. Yet despite this publicity, people still share personal thoughts and

experiences on the web. All blogs have a comment space where people can react to the

content of the blog, and, as McGinn said, people want to post “noteworthy” things so

they can receive “positive feedback.”

This desire also affects other social media websites. On Pinterest you want to pin

interesting things and have unique boards so that more people will follow you and

repin your pins. On Facebook you are seeking for the comments and the likes and the

shares. This culture has affected the rise of gender reveals in different ways; first, it

pressures us make things bigger to attract attention and entertain our viewers; second,

it exposes us to ideas for gender reveals we wouldn’t have otherwise thought of or

searched for; and third, it allows us to keep in contact with people that are otherwise

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too far away to take part in big events, essentially allowing us to have an online party or

celebration.

The gender reveal is an interesting trend that is literally only just becoming

popular. Through my research and collection process I have found that there are several

factors that have influenced it but all of them seem to be an effect of modernization and

technology advancement. In context to the folklore keys, gender reveals are an example

of problem solving. As ultrasound technology increases and takes the surprise out of

discovering your child’s identity at birth because we are able to discover the gender

earlier in the pregnancy, gender reveals allow us to put the anticipation and excitement

back into the revelation. Gender reveals also display aesthetic creativity as people create

their own personalized gender reveal in a variety of creative ways. And finally, gender

reveals display the group values of the younger generation of parents. The parents

value the inclusion of family and friends in the special moment of their lives and make

special efforts to create ways to share. These parents are connected socially and have an

online presence and audience they are catering to. But mostly it is clear that they are

excited for the arrival of a new child into their families and want to share it with those

in their lives. All of the people I interviewed didn’t even care what gender it was, they

were just excited to celebrate their new child.

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Not everyone however has bought into the new trend. There are those who are

against discovering the gender of their baby too early. My informant Genet Jones is one

of these. In her interview she said,

For me, there were several motivations to wait until baby was born. I minored in

gender studies and majored in computer science, and it was clear to me that a lot

of unjust and thoughtless cultural expectations are placed on children and adults

based on their gender. I was also shocked and frustrated by the way many

family and friends went from seeing me as an autonomous person, to seeing me

only as a baby container, which they felt they had a right to touch without

asking, pressure into doing things their way, and make inappropriate comments

about. Finally, I felt strongly that my job as a pregnant mama was to protect my

baby from negative physical and mental/spiritual influences. Those things

combined to make me very protective of my unborn baby’s privacy. (Item 2)

For Genet, not discovering or announcing the gender of her child is not only protecting

herself and her child physically, but also mentally and spiritually protecting them from

the pressures of gender and parenting advice. Another informant, Madeline McNeil,

has similar views.

If I don’t know then like, I don’t have to like, talk to anybody about like “oh this

will be what it’ll be like raising a boy and this is what it will be like raising a girl”

or I can get like gender neutral things and just have them for all of my kids and

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not have to worry about like girl stuff, boy stuff. I don’t know. It just

seems…it…seems appealing because it seems easier, simpler. You know. (Item 7)

Here Madeline reiterates the protective aspect of not revealing the gender of the baby

but also the practical aspects of planning for future children. The majority of women

only have a baby shower for their first child and so if they got all girl stuff for the first

child and had a boy second, they would have to go and purchase new items.

There is also the opinion that gender reveals are narcissistic or at least another

way to draw attention to ourselves. Madeline also said, “I think it’s funny that our

generation is just so like ‘Look at me!’ like ‘Look at what we have!’ like ‘This is what

we’re doing!’” (Item 7). Are gender reveals just another way to draw attention to the

parent? However, a counterargument to this is that gifts are rarely given at gender

reveal parties and it is a celebration of the child and its identity, not the parents.

Although there is something to be said about gender reveals just being a way to draw

attention to ourselves, isn’t that what almost all online activity is these days?

This tradition is new but rapidly growing in popularity. Although there is

opposition, it will be interesting to see if gender reveals in their various sizes will

continue to be seen in the generations to come and take their place among traditions

like birthdays, bridal showers, and baby showers. This is a growing trend that deserves

the attention of folkloric study to see how growing technologies and new ways of

interacting socially are shaping culture.

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Works Cited

Castro, Marilee. “Boy or Girl? Fetal Gender Prediction Myths.” FA 1 4273 box __. L.

Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University,

Provo, Utah. 2004.

Jones, Michael Owen. “Aesthetics at Work: Art and Ambience in an Organization.”

Exploring Folk Art: Twenty Years of Thought on Craft, Work, and Aesthetics.

Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1987. 133-157.

McGinn, Alma. “Getting Personal: Why Women Blog.” FA 1 3440 Box__. L. Tom Perry

Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

2006.

Paoletti, Jo B. Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Indiana

University Press, 2012.

Weaver, A. C., and B. B. Morrison. "Social Networking." Computer 41.2 (2008): 97-100.

Wilcox, Jessica. “GAME ON! Girl vs. Boy Gender Reveal Party.” Blog posting. 5 Mar.

2012. Hostess with the Mostess Blog. 20 Mar. 2013

<http://blog.hwtm.com/2012/03/gender-reveal-party-girl-versus-boy/>.