It’s beginning to look a lot like eugenics!

Michelle Weber, ,

I was in a North Carolina Rite-Aid yesterday, purchasing some products of a womanly nature. While walking down an aisle, I saw this.

Luckily, I wasn’t drinking anything at the time, or I would have done a spit-take all over the shelves and Rite-Aid probably would have made me buy the product. Although I suppose I could have brought it home and set it on fire to keep anyone else from using it.

Next time.

I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out who this product is for, given that it’s easy enough to find out the sex of your prospective baby during an ultrasound a bit later in a pregnancy. I was able to come up with two options:

  1. You care so much about having a child who hews precisely to established gender norms that you need to find out the sex at the ten-week mark so you can begin preparing accordingly.
  2. You have a marked preference for a child of a particular sex, and are prepared to terminate a pregnancy that doesn’t meet that preference.

Either way, you are a terrible person and I want to kick your grandmother in the shins.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the product; after all, it’s called “IntelliGender,” not “IntelliSex,” so perhaps the goal is just to let you know if you’re going to have a girly-boy. A pink line, and you’ll be having a child with a penis who also loves musical theater; a blue line, and your be-vagina’ed child will excel at wrestling and want to be a plumber. A transgender child, and the product automatically calls Planned Parenthood to schedule your abortion.

(That doesn’t actually make it any better, although that would be both a more impressive product and one with more accurate labeling.)

Merry goddamn Christmas.

24 Comments

  1. I thought it was a misappropriation of the word “intelligence” and marketed for the more simple who merely wish to know what color to paint the nursery . . . Funny that it is sitting on the shelf next to the Kotex!

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  3. I giggle just a teeny bit when people “know” the gender of their baby, have the nursery all set up, the blankets all monogramed, and then out comes baby with a SURPRISE!!!

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  5. I can’t even find a way they could spin this to be a good product. Perhaps it’s for parents who simply *have* to know whether their friends should buy “boy stuff” or “girl stuff” for the nursery? Heck if I know…the product doesn’t seem reliable at all, so using a Ouija board or consulting a telephone psychic would probably give a much better guess anyway!

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  6. I think we all need to come to terms with the fact that people are stupid and there unfortunately is a market for idiotic products like these. Perhaps it’s a test, if you buy a product like this the government will sterilise you so you can’t breed anymore. One can hope.

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  7. Fun post! Increasingly, we detest the unexpected. Rod Serling would starve these days. What we really need is an inter-womb predictor for fetuses (today’s pc term: Hotly Debated Zygote Clusters) that allows the helpless little blobs to at least guess with some accuracy whether the world they will soon enter in a corona of slime merits their explorations, or if they should deincarnate and try again later when hopefully the race isn’t so blindingly moronic. Wonderful Life awaits like a knuckle-popping thug at the far end of the birth canal. We’ve got to get word to them somehow.

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  8. My husband and I have this recurring conversation whenever we happen to step near shocking shite like this. Once the repeated realization that people are, well, just being people kicks in, our actual conversations consist of me asking a variation of, “What the cuss are people thinking?” to which he simply responds, “If people buy it, they’ll make it.” And then we get into a routine, but ever-endearing, 20-some-odd-year discussion about how astonished we are, me questioning everything and everyone and him responding that I’ve asked a lot of good questions to which he just doesn’t have the answers. One thing we have determined, though, is that we’re apparently a lot different than most other people. While it makes for good conversation (and blog posts, eh?), we’ve accepted that there are just some (okay, many) things of which we’ll likely never make sense. And at the end of each discussion, he lovingly encourages me to stop trying. Thanks for succeeding with this post, Michelle.

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  9. Wow wow wow. How can they even sell something like that?! Hold on, I have to go look at the photo again… $40?! Are you kidding me? It has a 50/50 shot of being right… I have those same odds. I should go into business as a baby gender predictor and only charge $30 a baby.

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  13. Hilarious! I have had a damn good snigger at this, Michelle. Particularly enjoyed your rant concerning the grandmother of said putative sprog – and the kicking thereof! LOVE your ante-penultimate paragraph too! But what I like best is the covert urine extraction of the kinds of people (using the last word in its loosest sense!) who would be sufficiently self-important/tediously earnest/downright sinister to buy such a product – those for whom the penis or lack of makes such a huge difference that they have to pin it down – as ’twere! – as soon as the ovum starts multiplying.
    Alienora

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