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Savannah Chiu

Professor Granillo

English 103

October 2019

Cakes and Sex

Cakes are often used to symbolize or commemorate a type of celebration or ceremony.

The subject of each cake can convey many different meanings through the use of rhetoric and

semiotics. Over time, cake has been used as a celebratory mechanism that has become integrated

with tradition and cultural values. For example, a cake that explores the celebration of a baby

being born can reveal many important ideologies that the audience may believe in. The bakery

Sweet Mary’s created a cake titled “​Wheels or Heels​”, that erroneously assumes there are only

two genders; however gender and its complexities vary by culture and cannot be represented nor

celebrated by the confines of a cake. The cake insinuates only two genders can be celebrated by

relying on symbols with an appeal to pathos with the use of symbolic emotion, ethos by relying

on an ethical plea to symbolic representations of gender, logos by a representative mode of

persuasion similarly linked to colors, and the use of a false dilemma, neglecting other genders;

therefore there are still many issues surrounding gender showing how American society can

work towards a more inclusive culture, even in cake decorations.

Overall the cake from Sweet Mary’s is equally proportioned, aesthetically pleasing, and

binary with its use of colors. The cake is covered in a contrasting black and white chevron print

on the sides. Throughout the cake, there are uses of blue and pink patterns that cover the base

with distinct contrasts. The top portion of the cake has two sculptures: womens high heels with
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pink bows and the other sculpture, a set of car tires in all black. The cake has a phrase that asks

“wheels or heels?”, begging the question of whether the celebration of birth will be for a boy or a

girl.

The cake made by “Sweet Mary’s” builds upon the traditions surrounding cake and how

these practices express the cultural values of those celebrating. The tradition of revealing the sex

of a baby through ceremony is one that has become popular and trendy in today’s society. Not

only are these types of festivities observed, but normally they rely on a cake as a crucial part of

the ceremony. Upon creating the cake, “Sweet Mary’s” relied on the use of rhetorical strategies

and semiotics to elicit the desired response from those in attendance of the “gender reveal” party.

By using pathos, the speaker was able to play to the audiences emotions. Sweet Mary’s used an

appeal to ethos to express how this particular audience is a subgroup that conforms to gender

roles. In order to appeal to the logical principles of those in attendance of the party, Sweet

Mary’s relied on an appeal to logos. Overall the bakery relied heavily on the use of symbols

throughout the cake. One could define symbols as “a sign in which the relationship between the

signifier and the signified is neither natural nor necessary but arbitrary, that is, decided on by the

conventions of a community by the agreement of some group” (Tyson 206).​ ​The “community”

or “group” in question are those in attendance of this gender reveal celebration. Sweet Mary’s

used symbols and rhetoric in the cake as an outlet to help signify that this “group” conforms to

the principle that there are only two genders.

The cake relies on an appeal to pathos to evoke pleasant emotions that are often

associated with the birth of a newborn baby. The cake uses many symbols to help convey

different types of emotions. In particular, the cake is decorated with shapes of hearts. Over time,
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hearts have been used as expressive symbols to epitomize the feeling of love and affection. The

cake plays to the audiences’ warmth and tenderness and assumes those in attendance are

generally pleased by the birth of a new child. The speaker uses multiple hearts to express the

growth of a family and therefore the expansion of love. Culturally the shape of a heart is

something that is globally referenced to as a symbol of love and Sweet Mary’s use of this shape

perfectly demonstrates how the audience is expected to feel. Those in attendance of the party can

look at the cake and agree that the cake helps them assume an overall feeling of warmth and

admiration. Although the cake is meant as a celebratory emblem, there are decorations on the

cake that poorly act as representations “gender”.

Sweet Mary’s relies on an appeal to ethos by playing to the importance of gender roles

and how culturally the “high-heel” and “cars” have been used as credible representations of

gender. In society, “our culture has come to a common understanding that a number of random

signs and symbols stand in for or symbolize specific concepts” (Rader and Silverman 13). In

this instance, high heels have come to be a symbol of female expression. Comparatively, wheels

and cars are used as symbolic representations of male bravado. The cake reveals that the speaker

and the audience are part of a group that conform to gender roles in the sense that women lean

toward femininity and that men have more masculine traits. These assumptions about gender are

prime examples of how symbols on a cake can reveal the perceptions of a group, “Cake elicits

judgement about both the execution of the cake and the celebratee” (Lussos 34).​ ​The cake

exploits it’s own interpretations of gender norms by assuming the audience has culturally

attached high-heels and car wheels to the sex of a baby. The appeal to ethos made by Sweet

Mary’s relies on the audiences’ conformity to the long held belief of gender norms and that an
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item or behavior can be attributed to the sex of a human. Along with the symbolic

representations, there are also uses of color throughout the cake that are calculated in there use.

There seems to be a deliberately logical attachment to the colors on the cake. The cake is

very neat and this binary organization appeals to the misconstrued rationale that the colors on a

cake can represent the sex of a child. Over time the colors of blue and pink have become

associated with gender. In modern day society, men are designated the color blue and women are

represented by the color pink. Historically pink and blue were merely colors with no cultural

significance, but have now become symbolic staples in representing gender in American culture.

These colors are now embodiments of male and female characteristics. These two colors can

assumably be used as logical indicators (or cultural fabrications) of what the cake is attempting

to assert. The audience is immediately made aware that this cake will declare the “gender” of a

baby. Although there are uses of color that categorize the newborn baby, there is also a fallacy

that is present that is used in the decoration of the cake.

Through the cake there is the use of a fallacy that discloses the true nature of a “gender”

reveal cake. The speaker uses the false dilemma fallacy, meaning there is only the option of

“either/or” and no other viable choices; this assumes the baby can only be the gender of boy or

girl. The speaker leaves out the fact that there are other representations of gender that many

outside of the immediate audience - those in attendance of the celebration - do not conform to.

The gender norms used in the cake neglect the fact that there can be those who choose to be a

non binary gender. Unfortunately, this cake is only representative of two genders. One can assert

that a baby born outside these binary genders will not receive the same level of affection

comparatively than to one that conforms to societally constructed gender binary roles due to the
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appeal to pathos used in the cake. If love is a primary motivator Sweet Mary’s used to decorate

the cake, then the love was only representative of the two genders. Unfortunately there is an

entire inconsistency with “gender reveal” parties. If the child chooses a non binary gender, this

contradicts the principles of Sweet Mary’s and those who solicited the cake. The traditions and

entire celebration surrounding the cake were meant to declare a boy or girl and these are not

standard genders held in modern day society.

Those who view this cake can innocently assume that this cake is a celebratory

representation of gender and the birth of a baby. Unfortunately, this cake relies too heavily on the

cultural​ fabrications of gender. The cake exploits the use of the colors blue and pink to equate

gender. The cake does not authentically manifest gender, but instead uses pathos, logos, and

ethos to convince a specific audience that gender can be expressed in an “either/or”

demonstration. As a progressive society there is still room for improvement when concerning

gender and sexuality. The idea of celebrating the “gender” of an infant is a discussion that can

negatively impact that child’s identity when developing, therefore American society needs to

rethink how to celebrate such a complex existence.

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Works Cited

Lussos, Rachael Graham. “Have Your Epideictic Rhetoric, and Eat It, Too.” ​Have Your

Epideictic Rhetoric, and Eat It, Too,​ 2018, pp. 28–46.

Silverman, Jonathan, and Dean Rader. “Semiotics: The Study of Signs (And Texts).” ​The World

Is a Text: Writing about Visual and Popular Culture,​ Compact ed., Broadview Press, 2018,

pp. 13–17.

Tyson, Lois. “Structuralist Criticism .” ​Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide​, 3rd ed.,

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2015, pp. 198–234.