This Baby Doll's "Crying" Noises Are Going Viral

A mum in Wales was shocked recently to find that the new doll she bought for her daughter makes sounds that are… less than appropriate for children. Gail Turley alleged to Wales Online that the baby doll’s crying sounds “erotic.” Eww. If there were four words I never needed to think about together, they would be “children’s toy” and “sex noises.” But here we are. Thanks, 2016.

Turley, 33, told Wales Online that she bought the “Lea” doll from Baby Wow’s Cry Babies line of dolls for her 2-year-old daughter, Kayla, after Kayla saw the doll on TV and started asking for one. A commercial for the dolls shows that Cry Babies are able to “cry” aloud and shed “real” tears. “I put it on my shelf ready to wrap but I thought I’d give it a try to see if it needed batteries,” she said. “I was shocked! I thought ‘Oh my God, I can’t give this to Kayla now’.” The shocking part? The doll’s crying sounded, as Turley put it, “erotic.”

Amazon reviews of the doll show that at least a few other customers agree with her. One Amazon UK review said of the “Lea” doll, “[I]t cries sounds like a dodgy porn star.” Another buyer of the Cry Babies “La La” doll wrote, “The voice on this doll is adult and sounds pornographic at times.” However, not everyone seems to agree with that assessment, as there are a number of positive reviews of the dolls that don’t mention any, er, inappropriate noises.

You can listen to Turley's recording of the doll below. What do you think? Are these sounds pornographic?

Speaking to Wales Online, Turley noted that there is a discrepancy between how the dolls sounded on TV and how her Lea doll sounds in real life. “I listened to the advert on telly and it had a baby crying so I assumed this baby would be the same,” she said. “But it sounds erotic — that’s the only way I can describe it.”

Wales Online has a poll up to see whether people interpret the doll's crying as "sexual," and right now 61 percent of respondents are saying, "No." But whether you think the doll’s crying sounds inappropriate or not, I think most would agree that it doesn’t really sound like a baby crying, which seems like a strange branding decision. (How hard is it to record an actual baby crying?) When I asked a friend to listen to the sound and tell me what he thought it was, his response was that the crying didn't sound like sex noises, but that it did sound like a horror movie. So, you know, still probably not great for kids.

Image: YouTube