I don’t believe in guilty pleasures – and I don’t think you should either. Which I say as someone who has a lot of them: hobbies, interests, habits, etc that I enjoy but find embarrassing, and not everyone knows I enjoy.
This last week, I’ve been asking what my family and friends consider their ‘guilty pleasures’. They named a wide range of things: eating a pastry outside Lidl when no one else has bought one (my mum), watching wrestling, listening to certain kinds of music (from Taylor Swift to My Chemical Romance), watching ASMR, reading fanfiction and watching Outlander or (my contribution) Call the Midwife.
Obviously, these are just silly little things we enjoy, innocuous but a little embarrassing or self-indulgent.
A capitalist-born need for constant productivity seems to heavily contribute to this sense of shame. My mum talked about feeling guilty watching her TV show because “there are things that need doing”. We constantly need to improve ourselves, to monetise or at least maximise the efficiency of our time. I think that in regard to leisure time, this mentality is especially prevalent in women. Women remain the main domestic labourers across the world, and it is not hard to see how this would make relaxing in your own home more difficult. As a woman, maybe we can argue it is feminist to engage in your guilty pleasures and power to practise self-care? My favourite feminist, bell hooks, in her book ‘Communion: The Search for Female Love’ says, “The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.”
But more importantly, it is our fear of being judged or desire to project a certain version of ourselves to the world, which we can all understand, that leads to the name ‘guilty pleasure’ . People don’t want to be judged, and it is hard to fault someone for not wanting to share all parts of themselves with every person they meet. But surely sometimes this means we are stifling our own personalities or, worse, potential connection with others? It seems deeply sad to do that, in favour of avoiding the mild judgement of others!
As with everything, there is nuance involved. For example, last year I blocked Taylor Swift from playing on my Spotify, partially because the obscenity of her wealth had finally soured her music for me, but also because I didn’t want her to show up on my Spotify Wrapped again. I didn’t want to be quite so embarrassed by it as I had been the year before. I hoped my ‘cooler’ music taste would show up, which in hindsight I have decided is almost more embarrassing than just admitting I enjoy listening to her. But both of these factors weighed in on my decision to block her: my desire to be seen as cool and my reluctance to give a billionaire any more money than she already has. Sometimes the shame of a ‘guilty pleasure’ is at least somewhat warranted.
For the most part, though, I believe that guilty pleasures don’t need to be guilty. We can just enjoy the pleasures of life without attaching shame or a moral meaning to what we love.