You think it’s a party for revealing the gender of the baby (I didn’t know “gender reveal party” was even a thing, but the internet tells me it is). But instead, it’s a party for the Green Clothes to reveal their own gender. And despite the fact that Green Clothes looks like a pregnant woman, he’s a fat man.
From his reaction, Orange Shirt is in a relationship with Green Clothes, and has mistakenly thought that Green Clothes was a woman he had gotten pregnant.
“From his reaction, Orange Shirt is in a relationship with Green Clothes, and has mistakenly thought that Green Clothes was a woman he had gotten pregnant.”
I disagree. In panel 3, orange-shirt is excited, not angry. In 3-5, orange-shirt is disappointed verging on angry that the rest of the crowd is not excited by the reveal.
I just want to congratulate Bill on managing to not know what a gender reveal party is until now. I mainly know about it because I’m left-wing enough to be annoyed at the imposition of gender binary even before birth… look, I grew up on FREE TO BE YOU AND ME, and now believe in gender fluidity and nonbinary identities and stuff. And so the idea that people have surprise parties to tell their friends what they’re having once the ultrasounds come back…. annoys me.
Also, they seem INCREDIBLY TACKY, which annoys me equally as much.
As such, I’m MORE comfortable with a situation in which a person throws a party to reveal their own gender. Still tacky, though.
Ian, what possibly made you think I didn’t know what a gender reveal party is?
As I mentioned in my comment, I hadn’t heard of a “gender reveal party” before (although the meaning was relatively obvious from context). Since Bill has, I claim ownership of the congratulation previously intended for Bill.
Back in the olden days, when I was being given siblings, the only way to know the gender of a baby was to take it out of the package. The package-opening tended to be the bigger deal, so, although there was an announcement made to friends, family, and the IRS within fairly short order.
Now that we can tell 30 minutes after the baby conceives, some people are impatient to know because they need to know what color plastic baby’s first possessions should be, or something. The practice of making a big to-do about announcing baby’s gender is big enough that A) commercials exist which are set at such parties, and B) you can find failed announcements on YouTube (largely, a big box of colored balloons is suspended, and yanking a cord is supposed to open the box, dropping the balloons, making the reveal but what actually happens is that yanking the cord causes the entire, unopened box to fall directly on the person, usually a small child. Another variant involves small children throwing tantrums because they were promised a brother and got a sister instead.) I spend an inordinate amount of time amusing myself with the temporary misery of others as captured by videorecording and made available on YouTube, so I’ve seen plenty of these. I can understand how a person with a normal life and other, useful things to do might have missed the trend… especially if they are at an age where they aren’t around a lot of expectant parents on a regular basis.
Or maybe Green Shirt is actually a woman, but is too dim to know what a Gender Reveal Party is…
I thought the most obvious way to have no clue what was going in that comic was to have no clue what was going on in that comic. However, since that wasn’t the case, I’m going to change my congratulations to commiserations, and swap my Congratulations to Winter Wallaby.
ianosmond, congratulations on a Comment Nobody Understands.
I’m also from the era James discusses, and for parents or families who wanted to have a name ready for the baby it would probably be necessary to prepare two. (I suppose this still holds for some families.) I distinctly remember the planning for my brother, 9 years younger than me, and his name alternatives. He is in fact Jason Ross, but would have been Amy Rose. (The middle names there are both in remembrance of my grandmother Rose. Jason however can’t remember her other than via that story.) My sister is 5 years behind me, so in principle I could remember a similar plan for her, but don’t know it. She is named Robin, and I guess an American boy could have been named that, but it would have been uncommon.
By the time my sister had her children the sex was commonly known or knowable. (I wouldn’t say gender for that context.) For the first one, the extended family, on both sides, got drawn into the naming. I and an aunt on the father’s side were holding out against the growing consensus on Alexandra, but we gave in on the condition that her nick should not be Alex but Sasha. (There is some Russian background.) Last week Alex visited here to defend her Ph.D. thesis, and nobody ever calls her Sasha (which also seems to have become one of those nicks that gets given as a full name). I don’t recall the extended family being called in so much when her sister came along — Miranda Warning.
My first and middle are Mitchell Dennis. The comics character Dennis the Menace has family name Mitchell, so for a while I thought I was backwards-named for him, and wondered what message my parents intended. Later I learned that the comic began after I did, by several months.
Re: Baby naming
Pressure for grandchildren began shortly after the wedding, despite a near-total lack of interest in producing children on our part. To chill, we floated possible baby names. If our firstborn should happen to be a boy, of course we’d want a name that people associate with strength, cunning, and success: Genghis. If our firstborn should turn out gyno-American, we of course wanted a feminine name but an uncommon one, so our little princess wouldn’t be lost in a sea of Madisons and Hannahs. Thus: Ludmilla. Those were the first round, and stuck the longest, but our lack-of-rush-to-reproduce stage lasted quite a while, so we had the opportunity to float many, many possible names for our hypothetical offspring.
James, Orange-Shirt in panel 3 does not look the least bit “excited” to me. I think the original interpretation is correct: he is just as shocked at whose gender is being revealed as the reader is supposed to be, if not moreso.
ianosmond, I’m confused by your post. I don’t want to argue about the left/right wing beliefs about the validity of gender fluidity. But everything that I have heard or read from those who believe it say that physically, one is either male or female, and that gender fluidity is all about how they identify at any moment. When a couple is expecting a child, it’s an exciting time and the gender is part of that. I don’t get what is annoying or tacky about that. Not trying to fan any flames but just trying to understand.
“James, Orange-Shirt in panel 3 does not look the least bit “excited” to me.”
Me, either. As I wrote above, in panel 3, Orange-shirt is disappointed that none of the other attendees (not clearly seen, but implied) bought into the premise of this event It doesn’t look like shock, for which the mouth would be open in an “O” shape, the lips are pursed and don’t change until panel 5, when Orange-shirt is also reacting to the second “reveal”.
—
” But everything that I have heard or read from those who believe it say that physically, one is either male or female”
Well, it turns out that this is just flatly not true, and never has been. The missing word is “intersex”
Biological sex, regardless of whether it’s at either binary extreme or not, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the idea of not imposing a gender upon the child, before letting them figure it out for themself.
As a fluid individual, the issue, to my mind, isn’t so much the assumption of the child’s gender based on their apparent sex, as the rather strict gender roles and presentation that the gendered toys, clothes, and furnishings that are going to form a larger part of the child’s environment than otherwise, will impose. (An issue that will exist even without this situation, but I would wager that people who would do this stuff are less likely to take steps to mitigate it.)
20 years ago, the hospitals were bought into it, or at least the one I was in at the time did. They glued little blue hair bows to the newborn boys in the nursury, and glued little pink ones on the girls. (All these little babies also had bracelets on them that identified the parents they should go home with, including name, sex, and birthdate, but most babies can’t read.) I think it was so that when the little darlings were in the viewing gallery, spectators would have a 50% better chance of admiring the correct offspring unit.
ianosmond – one does not need to be trans*, genderqueer or an ally to be horrified by gender reveal parties. One could be a feminist of any stripe (including TERFs) who objects to the effect emphasizing gender has on girls. One could be any variety of anti-consumerist (anarchist, socialist, someone who doesn’t care but doesn’t have the financial resources to blow on two of everything). One could even be someone who just thinks it’s hilarious to laugh at people who go to all sorts of bother to have a gender reveal party, buy all the baby stuff in the “appropriate” colour, and then be in tears because they can’t possibly dress a baby boy (girl) in clothes that were purchased for a baby girl (boy).
Mark M – leaving aside the fact that physical sex is only mostly that cut & dried (in addition to intersex individuals, I’ve seen the argument that various forms of trisomy with X & Y chromosomes doesn’t fit that either), gender reveal parties are a huge source of contention in the trans* community. I don’t entirely follow all the arguments, but my understanding is that it comes from two main complaints. The first is assuming that anyone who is biologically male will be a boy (some people would say “is a boy”, but if you are arguing that gender and sex are independent, you are objectively wrong to say that babies have gender.) The second one is that there is simply too much emphasis on gender in our society, and gender reveal parties are just the first step in insisting, for example, that your son wear his hair short. I know a friend of mine (who identifies as non-binary) tends to be horrified by anything that assumes a gender.
A friend of mine was considering (but didn’t space her kids widely enough to pull it off) staging a gender reveal party when she was pregnant with her second child, and announcing the gender of her first. Frankly, I don’t care how much you want to mock gender reveal parties, I don’t recommend spacing your kids that widely. If it happens anyhow, that would be hilarious. Perhaps even funnier than the green balloon trick.
James, you said “In panel 3, orange-shirt is excited, not angry.” I didn’t think he looked excited in Panel 3.
“James, you said ‘In panel 3, orange-shirt is excited, not angry.'”
That’s a typo, and rather obviously should refer to panel 2. (“rather obviously” because it’s in panel 2 that Orange-shirt looks excited, and because after the quoted text I went on to refer to a different expression in panel 3.)
James: Your comment doesn’t make sense if you change the “3” to a “2”. In panel 2, Orange-shirt does look excited in panel 2, but you were disagreeing with the hypothesis that Orange-shirt thought that it was a gender reveal party for a baby, rather than for Green clothes. Under that hypothesis, Orange-shirt didn’t know that it was a gender reveal part for Green clothes until panel 3.
” you were disagreeing with the hypothesis that Orange-shirt thought that it was a gender reveal party for a baby, rather than for Green clothes.”
Yes, that is correct. I continue to disagree with that hypothesis.
Go back to panel 1, and re-read the dialogue.
Whose gender reveal party is it? Panel 1 comes before panel 3, does it not?
The reader is misdirected as to whose gender is to be revealed, but the characters aren’t.
And Orange is not giving any indication of excitement in panel 3. As soon as Green says ‘I’m a boy’, his smile disappears. He’s obviously as confused about it as everyone else there.
Also, panel 1 is the only one where he’s paying attention to the audience, not Green.
Orange’s emotional state through the strip: Happy, Excited, Confused, Dismayed, Strongly Distressed.
1 – are they orange and green to not have a sex assigned to them by the color of their clothes?
2 – In the 1700s pink was a color for boys and blue for girls. We were at a Colonial Williamsburg first person presentation with a group of colonial women chatting with each other and the public about what was going on their lives. One woman was knitting (no crocheting then – at least not for English ladies) a baby something or other in pink for her grandchild. (We are friends with most of the ladies in the presentation, all employees of CW.) So knowing the secret of the reversal of the the colors I congratulated her on her on grandson – which opened up more discussion with the public.
When my youngest sister was expected we did not she would be a 3rd girl. So my parents were discussing names. We are also Jewish and the names had to start with E for my mom’s aunt and J both of our grandfathers. My mother came up with lots of names she liked. I forget the others, but Eric was one she really liked – and maybe Erica if it was a girl. My other sister and I rebelled against this as if it was a boy, fun would be made of him by calling him Erica by other kids and if the girl was Erica – the same problem in advance. We know. We both had first names that could be boy or girl names. My middle sister not only has a name which could go either way – but her husband has the same first name as her – as does Robert’s BIL. So we got mom to switch to alternate names. But then again, I picked her middle name which is a boy’s name except to “Little Women” fans – Jo.
Robert’s best friend from when he was in maybe 2nd grade was a second child. His name is Steve. His brother and his parents call(ed) him Sandy. Why? Before he was born his brother wanted to know what the baby’s name was and his mom told him Sandy as it is general neutral (or as was said back then – it could be a boy’s name or a girl’s name). Why they didn’t just stick to Sandy we don’t know.
Lastly, I promise, when my sister was having her second baby she wanted to name it after my dad. She decided if it was a boy she wanted to use my dad’s first name but felt awkward as I was the older and might have a son when I had a child and might want the name. I told her to go ahead as it was fine with me – and did not know if we would ever actually have a child (did not). I did not tell her that I had planned to name after my dad, but would not use his English (as opposed to Hebrew name) as I am sometimes superstitious. My dad and a first cousin of his were given the same English name after some cousin, a generation before them. The older cousin had died young. The first cousin died, not as young, but young. Dad died at 62. There was no way I was going to name a child with the same first name – it just seemed unlucky. (My nephew is doing well and does something that no one in our family could do – he is a musician and plays in a number of bands from big band music to ska, while working in an office to support himself.)
My understanding is that the colour reversal thing is a bit of a myth. I was a huge fan of that fact too, and then discovered that the “pink is for [gender] and blue is for [gender]” is a modern thing. It wasn’t strict enough in historical times to really count as a switch.
Christine, that’s also what I get from recent sources.
And actually I just happened to run across those discussions while looking for background on red states / blue states. At one time the political associations were quite different (even though not strictly reversed and not so much about electoral parties). But “Reds” were Communists, and left-leaning was “pink” (taken as a light shade of red).
Meryl, once my Great Uncle Lou (dad’s uncle) was coming to visit, and he was much more traditional and observant than our branch of the family. “What kind of name is Mitchell? You couldn’t find him a good Jewish name?”… “Oh Uncle Lou! That’s just an American adaptation of Moishe!”
We later found out he was just amused, and his son and daughter-in-law had proffered the same explanation for their boy Marshall’s name.
And that’s the other half of it! Gender colour-coding is regional too, I believe. Just like political colours. *Looks at red Liberal Party and blue Conservative Party branding* American political commentary is always so confusing because the colours are so official, and you actually have to know them to understand some commentary. (It’s not just that a map will be red & blue, with a key to say what was what.)
To clarify something that was implicit in Christine’s comment. The idea that there was a “reversal” seems like a bit of a myth to me as well, although it doesn’t seem totally clear. But the point that the identification of blue=boy and pink=girl is pretty new (post-WWII).
I wonder if in the past people felt this weird need to apologize for misidentifying your child’s gender. As in: “What a cute girl! Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry, he’s a boy? I’m really sorry.”
Preach it, Christine! Somewhere in the 90s I think the colors got hard coded in to the US political parties, and no one ever consulted me about it or at least sent me the memo. It has always bothered me, not least because it is opposite what you would expect from traditional color / party-wing assignments.
I have a history missing out things that somehow just seem to be in the air that “everyone” knows or agreed to. In college I was forever missing registration days, because they always came at a stupid time just when I was just really getting into the present semester, and no announcements were made that I ever saw or came to my attention — everyone just somehow “knew” that this day about a month into the current semester was the deadline day for picking classes for the next semester.
I also missed the memo in 7th grade when it was decided that everyone’s favorite song ever was “Take It on the Run” by REO Speedwagon — I mean, OK, favorite song currently playing on the radio, maybe, but favorite song ever? OK, well, let me make a note of that… [Few months later] What do you mean your favorite song is not “Take It on the Run”? You agreed to that back in October…”
Being an immigrant to the US obviously contributed to this, but also, as an immigrant, you are more aware of the arbitrariness of norms, so don’t put that much stock in them being unmutable Laws of the Universe, but everyone else who’s not multicultural doesn’t have this insight…
I know that there was a contest by Gerber (or similar) back in the day (I’m thinking only around 100 years ago) to guess the gender of 20 babies from their pictures. I believe they may have had only one right entry. Presumably that means people didn’t assume as much, because they didn’t expect to be able to tell. But now that you can find out the baby’s sex at the 20 week ultrasound, it’s assumed that everything will be colour-coded, so everyone can tell. My husband’s cousin “had” to put a headband on her daughter, because the daughter was so bald that you couldn’t tell she was a girl otherwise. I had someone be very surprised when I said we weren’t finding out for our second, because it’s useful, because then you know what colour to paint their room. (Note that this kind of reaction is exactly why we didn’t want to know, but my relationship with this person wasn’t such that I could call her out on it.)
larK: the red/blue thing in the US took its current form in the 2000 election; prior to that the association was much looser but decidedly the other way around.
The whole what-will-the-gender-be question was lost on us because my family went 60 years without producing a girl. As far as I can remember, my wife and I never even discussed girl names.
Here, let’s get this in the correct thread.
As I was reading the recent posts the streaming music service was playing:
Tillie – Pink & Blue (Single)
Synchronicity IRL. Not sure who Tillie is, no bio and Similar Artists: 0.
Mitch4 – My other name is Masha Channah. When we were married by a rabbi and priest (the rabbi is the one who legally officiated) they needed a Hebrew name for husband and his father for the ketubah (wedding certificate) I think it says Abraham instead of Robert and I forget when they used for his dad’s name (for son of…)
Oh my, I never thought of this – I have 3 different names for different reasons, I sound like a criminal.
Meryl aka Masha Channah aka Anne Everyman (my reenacting self’s name – stuck with surname husband picked).
Comics I Don't Understand 
You think it’s a party for revealing the gender of the baby (I didn’t know “gender reveal party” was even a thing, but the internet tells me it is). But instead, it’s a party for the Green Clothes to reveal their own gender. And despite the fact that Green Clothes looks like a pregnant woman, he’s a fat man.
From his reaction, Orange Shirt is in a relationship with Green Clothes, and has mistakenly thought that Green Clothes was a woman he had gotten pregnant.
“From his reaction, Orange Shirt is in a relationship with Green Clothes, and has mistakenly thought that Green Clothes was a woman he had gotten pregnant.”
I disagree. In panel 3, orange-shirt is excited, not angry. In 3-5, orange-shirt is disappointed verging on angry that the rest of the crowd is not excited by the reveal.
I just want to congratulate Bill on managing to not know what a gender reveal party is until now. I mainly know about it because I’m left-wing enough to be annoyed at the imposition of gender binary even before birth… look, I grew up on FREE TO BE YOU AND ME, and now believe in gender fluidity and nonbinary identities and stuff. And so the idea that people have surprise parties to tell their friends what they’re having once the ultrasounds come back…. annoys me.
Also, they seem INCREDIBLY TACKY, which annoys me equally as much.
As such, I’m MORE comfortable with a situation in which a person throws a party to reveal their own gender. Still tacky, though.
Ian, what possibly made you think I didn’t know what a gender reveal party is?
As I mentioned in my comment, I hadn’t heard of a “gender reveal party” before (although the meaning was relatively obvious from context). Since Bill has, I claim ownership of the congratulation previously intended for Bill.
Back in the olden days, when I was being given siblings, the only way to know the gender of a baby was to take it out of the package. The package-opening tended to be the bigger deal, so, although there was an announcement made to friends, family, and the IRS within fairly short order.
Now that we can tell 30 minutes after the baby conceives, some people are impatient to know because they need to know what color plastic baby’s first possessions should be, or something. The practice of making a big to-do about announcing baby’s gender is big enough that A) commercials exist which are set at such parties, and B) you can find failed announcements on YouTube (largely, a big box of colored balloons is suspended, and yanking a cord is supposed to open the box, dropping the balloons, making the reveal but what actually happens is that yanking the cord causes the entire, unopened box to fall directly on the person, usually a small child. Another variant involves small children throwing tantrums because they were promised a brother and got a sister instead.) I spend an inordinate amount of time amusing myself with the temporary misery of others as captured by videorecording and made available on YouTube, so I’ve seen plenty of these. I can understand how a person with a normal life and other, useful things to do might have missed the trend… especially if they are at an age where they aren’t around a lot of expectant parents on a regular basis.
Or maybe Green Shirt is actually a woman, but is too dim to know what a Gender Reveal Party is…
I thought the most obvious way to have no clue what was going in that comic was to have no clue what was going on in that comic. However, since that wasn’t the case, I’m going to change my congratulations to commiserations, and swap my Congratulations to Winter Wallaby.
ianosmond, congratulations on a Comment Nobody Understands.
I’m also from the era James discusses, and for parents or families who wanted to have a name ready for the baby it would probably be necessary to prepare two. (I suppose this still holds for some families.) I distinctly remember the planning for my brother, 9 years younger than me, and his name alternatives. He is in fact Jason Ross, but would have been Amy Rose. (The middle names there are both in remembrance of my grandmother Rose. Jason however can’t remember her other than via that story.) My sister is 5 years behind me, so in principle I could remember a similar plan for her, but don’t know it. She is named Robin, and I guess an American boy could have been named that, but it would have been uncommon.
By the time my sister had her children the sex was commonly known or knowable. (I wouldn’t say gender for that context.) For the first one, the extended family, on both sides, got drawn into the naming. I and an aunt on the father’s side were holding out against the growing consensus on Alexandra, but we gave in on the condition that her nick should not be Alex but Sasha. (There is some Russian background.) Last week Alex visited here to defend her Ph.D. thesis, and nobody ever calls her Sasha (which also seems to have become one of those nicks that gets given as a full name). I don’t recall the extended family being called in so much when her sister came along — Miranda Warning.
My first and middle are Mitchell Dennis. The comics character Dennis the Menace has family name Mitchell, so for a while I thought I was backwards-named for him, and wondered what message my parents intended. Later I learned that the comic began after I did, by several months.
Re: Baby naming
Pressure for grandchildren began shortly after the wedding, despite a near-total lack of interest in producing children on our part. To chill, we floated possible baby names. If our firstborn should happen to be a boy, of course we’d want a name that people associate with strength, cunning, and success: Genghis. If our firstborn should turn out gyno-American, we of course wanted a feminine name but an uncommon one, so our little princess wouldn’t be lost in a sea of Madisons and Hannahs. Thus: Ludmilla. Those were the first round, and stuck the longest, but our lack-of-rush-to-reproduce stage lasted quite a while, so we had the opportunity to float many, many possible names for our hypothetical offspring.
James, Orange-Shirt in panel 3 does not look the least bit “excited” to me. I think the original interpretation is correct: he is just as shocked at whose gender is being revealed as the reader is supposed to be, if not moreso.
ianosmond, I’m confused by your post. I don’t want to argue about the left/right wing beliefs about the validity of gender fluidity. But everything that I have heard or read from those who believe it say that physically, one is either male or female, and that gender fluidity is all about how they identify at any moment. When a couple is expecting a child, it’s an exciting time and the gender is part of that. I don’t get what is annoying or tacky about that. Not trying to fan any flames but just trying to understand.
“James, Orange-Shirt in panel 3 does not look the least bit “excited” to me.”
Me, either. As I wrote above, in panel 3, Orange-shirt is disappointed that none of the other attendees (not clearly seen, but implied) bought into the premise of this event It doesn’t look like shock, for which the mouth would be open in an “O” shape, the lips are pursed and don’t change until panel 5, when Orange-shirt is also reacting to the second “reveal”.
—
” But everything that I have heard or read from those who believe it say that physically, one is either male or female”
Well, it turns out that this is just flatly not true, and never has been. The missing word is “intersex”
Biological sex, regardless of whether it’s at either binary extreme or not, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the idea of not imposing a gender upon the child, before letting them figure it out for themself.
As a fluid individual, the issue, to my mind, isn’t so much the assumption of the child’s gender based on their apparent sex, as the rather strict gender roles and presentation that the gendered toys, clothes, and furnishings that are going to form a larger part of the child’s environment than otherwise, will impose. (An issue that will exist even without this situation, but I would wager that people who would do this stuff are less likely to take steps to mitigate it.)
20 years ago, the hospitals were bought into it, or at least the one I was in at the time did. They glued little blue hair bows to the newborn boys in the nursury, and glued little pink ones on the girls. (All these little babies also had bracelets on them that identified the parents they should go home with, including name, sex, and birthdate, but most babies can’t read.) I think it was so that when the little darlings were in the viewing gallery, spectators would have a 50% better chance of admiring the correct offspring unit.
ianosmond – one does not need to be trans*, genderqueer or an ally to be horrified by gender reveal parties. One could be a feminist of any stripe (including TERFs) who objects to the effect emphasizing gender has on girls. One could be any variety of anti-consumerist (anarchist, socialist, someone who doesn’t care but doesn’t have the financial resources to blow on two of everything). One could even be someone who just thinks it’s hilarious to laugh at people who go to all sorts of bother to have a gender reveal party, buy all the baby stuff in the “appropriate” colour, and then be in tears because they can’t possibly dress a baby boy (girl) in clothes that were purchased for a baby girl (boy).
Mark M – leaving aside the fact that physical sex is only mostly that cut & dried (in addition to intersex individuals, I’ve seen the argument that various forms of trisomy with X & Y chromosomes doesn’t fit that either), gender reveal parties are a huge source of contention in the trans* community. I don’t entirely follow all the arguments, but my understanding is that it comes from two main complaints. The first is assuming that anyone who is biologically male will be a boy (some people would say “is a boy”, but if you are arguing that gender and sex are independent, you are objectively wrong to say that babies have gender.) The second one is that there is simply too much emphasis on gender in our society, and gender reveal parties are just the first step in insisting, for example, that your son wear his hair short. I know a friend of mine (who identifies as non-binary) tends to be horrified by anything that assumes a gender.
A friend of mine was considering (but didn’t space her kids widely enough to pull it off) staging a gender reveal party when she was pregnant with her second child, and announcing the gender of her first. Frankly, I don’t care how much you want to mock gender reveal parties, I don’t recommend spacing your kids that widely. If it happens anyhow, that would be hilarious. Perhaps even funnier than the green balloon trick.
James, you said “In panel 3, orange-shirt is excited, not angry.” I didn’t think he looked excited in Panel 3.
“James, you said ‘In panel 3, orange-shirt is excited, not angry.'”
That’s a typo, and rather obviously should refer to panel 2. (“rather obviously” because it’s in panel 2 that Orange-shirt looks excited, and because after the quoted text I went on to refer to a different expression in panel 3.)
James: Your comment doesn’t make sense if you change the “3” to a “2”. In panel 2, Orange-shirt does look excited in panel 2, but you were disagreeing with the hypothesis that Orange-shirt thought that it was a gender reveal party for a baby, rather than for Green clothes. Under that hypothesis, Orange-shirt didn’t know that it was a gender reveal part for Green clothes until panel 3.
” you were disagreeing with the hypothesis that Orange-shirt thought that it was a gender reveal party for a baby, rather than for Green clothes.”
Yes, that is correct. I continue to disagree with that hypothesis.
Go back to panel 1, and re-read the dialogue.
Whose gender reveal party is it? Panel 1 comes before panel 3, does it not?
The reader is misdirected as to whose gender is to be revealed, but the characters aren’t.
And Orange is not giving any indication of excitement in panel 3. As soon as Green says ‘I’m a boy’, his smile disappears. He’s obviously as confused about it as everyone else there.
Also, panel 1 is the only one where he’s paying attention to the audience, not Green.
Orange’s emotional state through the strip: Happy, Excited, Confused, Dismayed, Strongly Distressed.
1 – are they orange and green to not have a sex assigned to them by the color of their clothes?
2 – In the 1700s pink was a color for boys and blue for girls. We were at a Colonial Williamsburg first person presentation with a group of colonial women chatting with each other and the public about what was going on their lives. One woman was knitting (no crocheting then – at least not for English ladies) a baby something or other in pink for her grandchild. (We are friends with most of the ladies in the presentation, all employees of CW.) So knowing the secret of the reversal of the the colors I congratulated her on her on grandson – which opened up more discussion with the public.
When my youngest sister was expected we did not she would be a 3rd girl. So my parents were discussing names. We are also Jewish and the names had to start with E for my mom’s aunt and J both of our grandfathers. My mother came up with lots of names she liked. I forget the others, but Eric was one she really liked – and maybe Erica if it was a girl. My other sister and I rebelled against this as if it was a boy, fun would be made of him by calling him Erica by other kids and if the girl was Erica – the same problem in advance. We know. We both had first names that could be boy or girl names. My middle sister not only has a name which could go either way – but her husband has the same first name as her – as does Robert’s BIL. So we got mom to switch to alternate names. But then again, I picked her middle name which is a boy’s name except to “Little Women” fans – Jo.
Robert’s best friend from when he was in maybe 2nd grade was a second child. His name is Steve. His brother and his parents call(ed) him Sandy. Why? Before he was born his brother wanted to know what the baby’s name was and his mom told him Sandy as it is general neutral (or as was said back then – it could be a boy’s name or a girl’s name). Why they didn’t just stick to Sandy we don’t know.
Lastly, I promise, when my sister was having her second baby she wanted to name it after my dad. She decided if it was a boy she wanted to use my dad’s first name but felt awkward as I was the older and might have a son when I had a child and might want the name. I told her to go ahead as it was fine with me – and did not know if we would ever actually have a child (did not). I did not tell her that I had planned to name after my dad, but would not use his English (as opposed to Hebrew name) as I am sometimes superstitious. My dad and a first cousin of his were given the same English name after some cousin, a generation before them. The older cousin had died young. The first cousin died, not as young, but young. Dad died at 62. There was no way I was going to name a child with the same first name – it just seemed unlucky. (My nephew is doing well and does something that no one in our family could do – he is a musician and plays in a number of bands from big band music to ska, while working in an office to support himself.)
My understanding is that the colour reversal thing is a bit of a myth. I was a huge fan of that fact too, and then discovered that the “pink is for [gender] and blue is for [gender]” is a modern thing. It wasn’t strict enough in historical times to really count as a switch.
Christine, that’s also what I get from recent sources.
And actually I just happened to run across those discussions while looking for background on red states / blue states. At one time the political associations were quite different (even though not strictly reversed and not so much about electoral parties). But “Reds” were Communists, and left-leaning was “pink” (taken as a light shade of red).
Meryl, once my Great Uncle Lou (dad’s uncle) was coming to visit, and he was much more traditional and observant than our branch of the family. “What kind of name is Mitchell? You couldn’t find him a good Jewish name?”… “Oh Uncle Lou! That’s just an American adaptation of Moishe!”
We later found out he was just amused, and his son and daughter-in-law had proffered the same explanation for their boy Marshall’s name.
And that’s the other half of it! Gender colour-coding is regional too, I believe. Just like political colours. *Looks at red Liberal Party and blue Conservative Party branding* American political commentary is always so confusing because the colours are so official, and you actually have to know them to understand some commentary. (It’s not just that a map will be red & blue, with a key to say what was what.)
To clarify something that was implicit in Christine’s comment. The idea that there was a “reversal” seems like a bit of a myth to me as well, although it doesn’t seem totally clear. But the point that the identification of blue=boy and pink=girl is pretty new (post-WWII).
I wonder if in the past people felt this weird need to apologize for misidentifying your child’s gender. As in: “What a cute girl! Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry, he’s a boy? I’m really sorry.”
Preach it, Christine! Somewhere in the 90s I think the colors got hard coded in to the US political parties, and no one ever consulted me about it or at least sent me the memo. It has always bothered me, not least because it is opposite what you would expect from traditional color / party-wing assignments.
I have a history missing out things that somehow just seem to be in the air that “everyone” knows or agreed to. In college I was forever missing registration days, because they always came at a stupid time just when I was just really getting into the present semester, and no announcements were made that I ever saw or came to my attention — everyone just somehow “knew” that this day about a month into the current semester was the deadline day for picking classes for the next semester.
I also missed the memo in 7th grade when it was decided that everyone’s favorite song ever was “Take It on the Run” by REO Speedwagon — I mean, OK, favorite song currently playing on the radio, maybe, but favorite song ever? OK, well, let me make a note of that… [Few months later] What do you mean your favorite song is not “Take It on the Run”? You agreed to that back in October…”
Being an immigrant to the US obviously contributed to this, but also, as an immigrant, you are more aware of the arbitrariness of norms, so don’t put that much stock in them being unmutable Laws of the Universe, but everyone else who’s not multicultural doesn’t have this insight…
I know that there was a contest by Gerber (or similar) back in the day (I’m thinking only around 100 years ago) to guess the gender of 20 babies from their pictures. I believe they may have had only one right entry. Presumably that means people didn’t assume as much, because they didn’t expect to be able to tell. But now that you can find out the baby’s sex at the 20 week ultrasound, it’s assumed that everything will be colour-coded, so everyone can tell. My husband’s cousin “had” to put a headband on her daughter, because the daughter was so bald that you couldn’t tell she was a girl otherwise. I had someone be very surprised when I said we weren’t finding out for our second, because it’s useful, because then you know what colour to paint their room. (Note that this kind of reaction is exactly why we didn’t want to know, but my relationship with this person wasn’t such that I could call her out on it.)
larK: the red/blue thing in the US took its current form in the 2000 election; prior to that the association was much looser but decidedly the other way around.
The whole what-will-the-gender-be question was lost on us because my family went 60 years without producing a girl. As far as I can remember, my wife and I never even discussed girl names.
Here, let’s get this in the correct thread.
As I was reading the recent posts the streaming music service was playing:
Tillie – Pink & Blue (Single)
Synchronicity IRL. Not sure who Tillie is, no bio and Similar Artists: 0.
Mitch4 – My other name is Masha Channah. When we were married by a rabbi and priest (the rabbi is the one who legally officiated) they needed a Hebrew name for husband and his father for the ketubah (wedding certificate) I think it says Abraham instead of Robert and I forget when they used for his dad’s name (for son of…)
Oh my, I never thought of this – I have 3 different names for different reasons, I sound like a criminal.
Meryl aka Masha Channah aka Anne Everyman (my reenacting self’s name – stuck with surname husband picked).