by JanieM
Recent topic of conversation: various generations of my family and their love of Lego. My sister said my niece had had “pink Lego” as a child, and that her (my niece’s) five-year-old son plays with them now, among many other Lego sets that he owns.
The mention of “pink” for girls led me to observe that when my own kids were born, I was bemused (okay, dismayed) to realize that the world, or at least US popular culture, had not moved an inch in a direction I would have considered forward, and was still obsessed with pink baby clothes for girls and blue for boys.
The fact that large swaths of US popular culture have, yet another generation later, moved not only not forward, but quite a bit backward, is signaled by the fact even the death toll from explosions at gender reveal parties hasn’t convinced people that gender reveal parties are the most idiotic idea since square wheels.
Actually, it’s even worse than I thought when I set out to write this frivolity. I had remembered reading about a death from shrapnel at a gender reveal party fairly recently, but Newsweek says there have been four deaths at these shindigs just this year.