I didn’t see this Harry Styles gender reveal coming

Victoria Richards, The Independent

If you thought the concept of “gender reveals” had had its day, with people taking them to outrageous and outlandish extremes (here’s looking at you, the Louisiana couple who used a live 10-foot alligator to announce the gender of their new baby boy by having Mike — or “T-Mike, the Gator King” as he prefers to be known — biting into a watermelon filled with blue slime) you’d be... right.

Still, like them or loathe them, it doesn’t matter anymore anyway: because Harry Styles has officially ruined baby announcements for everyone.

The singer, who’s been at Wembley this week with his Love on Tour series of gigs, outdid even the rare baby rhinoceros who had a gender reveal party at a Kansas zoo: he seized a fan’s black balloon, live on stage, and pricked it using a safety pin... in front of almost 90,000 people.

Harry played the perfect fall-guy: pretending to burst the balloon twice before he actually did it, then showering the stage in pink confetti and screeching that he was “so excited!” (Given he was wearing a pair of harlequin gold and black dungarees, if things don’t go well in the future then he could give being a children’s entertainer a good go). You can’t get much more impressive than revealing the sex of your baby in front of an entire stadium filled with cowboy hats and feather boas, so the rest of us might as well give up now.

Though really, shouldn’t we have given them up a long time ago? Say, in the late 1990s? They feel incredibly outdated, not least because of our understanding and embracing of gender fluidity has changed — and we are all the better for it.

To me, the whole idea of “gender reveals” already feel like the kind of thing you’d watch Tom Hanks haphazardly attending in Big, or Jennifer Garner going to while pretending to be an adult in 13 Going on 30. By which I mean: thirty, flirty and procreating. Celebrating a slice of cake coming out in pink or blue all feels very old fashioned, now.

Ubiquitous to the point of being tedious, even the woman who invented the concept has described them as “crazy” and denounced them, because “who cares what gender the baby is?” They’re also verging on downright farcical (who amongst us hasn’t dreamed of finding out about a loved one’s progeny via the medium of coloured lasagne?)

I can’t help thinking that what started as a sweet quirk has consumed itself entirely, and become Frankenstein-ish in its voracity. One party led to a plane crash, while another was disrupted by two flying racoons being launched out of a combine harvester. Those sound pretty incredible to me, but also maybe they’re... a lot? I feel a bit like the colourblind father-to-be, whose gender reveal surprise ended up a damp squib because he couldn’t tell pink from blue anyway. I just don’t see the point of them.

Doesn’t it seem like gender reveals are almost rat king-like in their competitiveness and bid for headlines? Shouldn’t it be... well, about celebrating love and bonding and welcoming new life? Surely that can be done without contaminating an entire town’s water supply, as one hapless couple did when they dyed the local waterfall bright blue to herald the imminent arrival of their baby boy. I know. I sound like a kill-joy. But I can’t help thinking that in the ridiculous attempt to outdo each other, or to impress our friends, we’ve sort of lost sight of what it’s really all about in the first place.

Now that one lucky Harry Styles fan has us all beat, maybe it’s finally time to do away with the whole sorry practice.