'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' Season 7 Episode 10: Jake and Amy's pregnancy shows how useless sex-reveal parties are
‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ Season 7 Episode 10 touches upon a lot of things: Hating one’s father, undocumented immigrants not willing to become state witnesses fearing repercussions from ICE, a fictional parenting book by actor Bruce Willis called ‘Cry Hard’ (yes, that was an excellent pun). But the most important thing it touched upon was just how insanely useless sex-reveal parties can be.
Jake (Andy Samberg) and Amy (Melissa Fumero) decided to have a gender reveal party. They got the sex-reveal cake — a cake that when you cut into reveals the color under the frosting: blue for boy and pink for a girl.
In true ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ fashion, things don’t go as planned. Before Jake and Amy could find out their baby’s biological sex, during a fight between Jake’s father and his grandfather, the cake is dropped. Even though they try to ‘Birdbox’ and clean up the mess blindfolded, they make a bigger mess and ultimately, Boyle has to help them clean up and make a new cake.
Somehow, this new cake’s color turns out to be green and the party is ruined as Jake’s father and grandfather get into a fight again. Amy ultimately finds out through another cake Jake makes for her, which Scully has already eaten; but has flecks of it all over his face. It was a boy!
Classic ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ shenanigans, yes. But it does bring to light just how bad sex-reveal parties can get. Even though this is a situation very unlikely to ever take place in real life ― although sex-reveal cakes have definitely gotten way weird ― it does not discount that these cakes and these parties are generally a bad idea.
In fact, as per a 2019 Guardian article, the mother who started gender-reveal parties now regrets them. Jenna Myers Karvunidis, the report notes, who first came up with the idea in 2008, confessed to “major mixed feelings” about the whole idea now. She felt the idea was becoming politicized by conservative forces. “I feel like the guy who invented gunpowder,” she told the Guardian. “I’m the one who put the form to it. I’m the one who said: ‘This is something we’re going to celebrate now, and this is how we’re going to do it’. I put it out there.”
She further said, “I know I played a role in it and it makes me sick,” adding, “I’m pro-choice. What else am I going to be? I have three daughters. In the US, our reproductive rights are being eroded down to nothing. You’ll have a six-day-old ball of cells eclipsing an adult human woman’s medical decisions. It’s not a football player or a ballet dancer, it’s a fetus, but the gender-reveal helps people forget that.”
“I don’t want to shame people for having a party. I hope everyone has cake when they want it,” she said, “But let’s just eat it in socially appropriate ways.”
Another important issue with “gender-reveal parties” is that they choose to ignore the differences between gender and sex. One is born to biological sex, but gender is wholly a social construct. These parties then erase the presence of transgender or gender non-binary folk. They should ideally be called sex-reveal parties ideally, and even then it’s problematic because not everyone is born to the conformed binary of male and female, biologically.
Speaking to BBC last year, Helen, a mother of a transgender child, said gender reveal parties enforce “hideously stereotyped boxes where girls equal pink princesses and boys equal blue cowboys”. She added that as children grow up these stereotypes prevent girls from studying traditionally masculine subjects like maths and science and instill in boys the belief that it is “feeble” to express emotions.
According to Helen, gender reveal parties prevent children from “being celebrated in all their infinite diversity. They are made to feel shameful if they don't fit into this gendered stereotype”.
'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' Season 7 airs on Thursdays, at 8.30 pm only on NBC.
