Someone who had recently given birth once told me that, upon hearing a baby cry, her breasts would leak milk, presumably as some sort of unconscious, primitive maternal stimulus (wonder of motherhood, blah fucking blah).
That strikes me as being an unedifying position to be in, at the whims of whatever brats are in the vicinity and requiring a spare blouse at any given time of the day, though I suspect that most women who have given birth are rather nonplussed by the idea of embarrassment at unintentional milk spillage, having had various people prod their vaginas and sew them up again after a small screaming red thing has emerged from the part of them normally reserved for their partner’s penis (or turkey-baster).
Anyway, the point is that the sound of a baby screaming has unfortunate ramifications. For new mothers, surprise lactation. For absolutely everyone else, pain on a level similar to receiving anesthetic-free root-canal surgery.
The sound of a child screaming is the most awful noise known to man, worse even that the noise of Piers Morgan having a wank or Janet Street-Porter being bummed.
It’s a noise designed to do something to us – as animals who got ideas above our station – on a primal level. It demands that we do something about it. You can’t fight it. It’s like being scared of heights; it’s like wanting to have sex with beautiful members of the opposite sex; it’s like being disgusted by George Osborne’s face. It’s built into us.
I’ve not made up my mind whether Dulux knows about this or not. A charitable reading is that the people who made this ad simply thought it was a clever juxtaposition. A more sinister reading suggests that the people who made this advert know exactly what they’re doing; annoying the living fuck out of people in order to make a more memorable advert.
Halfords had an ad over Christmas with a young girl screaming all the way though it – and I wondered whether we’d have a raft of baby-scream ads, delivering precision-guided primal shocks to your very core.
If it is deliberate there’s only way to go after this – an ultrasonic non-lethal weapon that makes people vomit up their spleens. That’d be memorable, eh?