Raised in a culturally middle-class British family, I am an expert on the experience of guilt. Not of ‘guilt’ in a legal sense. I am a nervous goody-two-shoes without a rebellious bone in my body – I would never dare to scan through all my groceries as potatoes. But I am a begrudging expert in the experience of guilt associated with anxiety and a preoccupation of how you are perceived in the present and in the past. Aimless guilt: perhaps the most white, middle-class experience one can have!

This guilt pertains to many things – though mostly to awkward social interactions. But a discussion of such experiences is for a therapist – and I doubt anyone reading this is either interested or qualified. Instead, I would like to talk about a different permutation of guilt.

Something I find fascinating is how guilt and aesthetic taste intersect in the phenomena of the guilty pleasure.  

Most simply, ‘guilty pleasure’ can be understood, as Kris Goffin and Florian Cova contend: ” (as) an emotionally ambiguous experience: We enjoy something (a positive affect) but simultaneously feel bad about it (a negative affect).”  

Simple, understandable, relatable. But the origin of the bad feeling that constitutes ‘guilty pleasure’ is nuanced and connected to how many cultural circles collectively value art and media.

The term has a fascinating etymology. Jennifer Szalai in an article for the New Yorker notes that in 1860 when the term first appeared in the New York Times it was not connected to guilt surrounding one’s aesthetic choices. Instead, it was used at the time to describe a pleasure for which they believed one should feel morally guilty: visiting a brothel. Sometime in the latter part of the 20th century, the term became tied to the toxic debate of what constitutes high and low art. The modern meaning of ‘guilty pleasure’ – the enjoyment of a piece of art or media that one feels they should be self-conscious of – became common parlance in the 1980s and has maintained this meaning ever since.  

Philosophers Kris Goffin, Florian Cova and Nicolas Plain have linked the phenomena of guilty pleasure to the notion of folk aesthetics. ‘Folk aesthetics’ is a concept that contends that most cultures are ‘natural normativists’ when it comes to aesthetic judgements: that people unconsciously trend towards the belief that there is such thing as universal taste, and that there is such thing as universally good and bad art.

While this notion is undoubtably questionable when applied to all cultures and settings, it certainly speaks to those for which guilty pleasures are a modern concern. For guilty pleasures to exist, there must be a certain assumption that there are aesthetic products that are bad – as deemed by the society or subculture to which someone is a member – and that liking bad art should elicit guilt. It requires the one experiencing the guilt, consciously or unconsciously, to believe that art and media are subject to norms that determine what is wrong to take pleasure in, and what should not be enjoyed.

In saying this, and in what I will eventually argue, I do not mean to suggest that there should be any shame in having used ‘guilty pleasure’ to qualify something you have liked, or to personally feel guilt or contrition for finding pleasure in something.

Shame is not valid or useful in this discussion. Firstly, shame for enjoying something that one perceives to be deserving of guilt is what we are trying to pull apart here. But more than that, guilt surrounding aesthetic pleasure evolves outside of the experiencers control. The perceived normativity of cultural valuation that leads to existence of guilty pleasures is a very natural state. This belief in such normativity is developed throughout our lives. It is established and substantiated throughout many of our systems, perhaps most impactfully through education. The ubiquity with which Shakespeare is still taught in high schools is certainly bound to a wider project of trying to indoctrinate young people into understanding what ‘good’ art is, and thus what ‘bad’ art they should feel guilty for enjoying.

This concept of the universality of ‘good’ art is also tied to taught national identity, and how national artistic canons help substantiate and propagandize nationalism. But that is its own greater topic, not explicitly related to guilty pleasures, and beyond what my little head can currently handle right now.

I can only speak to my cis-het, white, Australian experience – but ‘guilty pleasure’ seems most prevalent in the artistic discussions of the white, westernized middle-class, and must pertain to popular media.

When I say popular media, I mean media and art that is of a widely recognizable form. It makes sense to say that a certain anime or Korean soap opera might be a guilty pleasure. Even though not many people may have seen the media in question, the form of media – ‘anime’ and ‘soap opera’ – are forms that are widely culturally recognised. On the other hand, it would not make much sense to label something like the very specific cinema of a certain foreign country a guilty pleasure. In that case it would just be a niche interest.

As such, guilty pleasures eventuate not only when certain specific works or series are culturally deemed worthy of guilt (50 Shades series), but also manifests with regards to entire forms or genres (romance books or soap operas).   

This is because the ‘guilt’ must be tied to some kind of existent folk aesthetic valuation – and thus has to be at least somewhat significant to the broader cultural consciousness. ‘Guilty pleasure’ must be attributed to something that the someone means to defend, and thus must be something that others in their cultural circle might deem worthy of guilt – whether it be a specific work, or a genre that someone should feel shame for enjoying.

With such broad, uninterrogated assumptions being made about entire forms of media and art, it is very obvious how this phenomenon can be culturally problematic. Because ‘guilty pleasure’ is connected to the concept of folk aesthetics, the term – and therefore what pleasures people should feel guilty for – is indelibly tied to existent preconceptions, prejudices, bigotry. If valuations of art are connected to a perceived universal cultural attribution, what constitutes a ‘guilty pleasure’ is inevitably bound to cultural biases that pertain to the target group for which a piece media was created.

This is evident in how, when thinking of common guilty pleasures, media aimed at a teen-girl audience comes to mind. Music from pop idols such as Katy Perry or Taylor Swift, and film and book series such as Twilight are a faux pas to enjoy in many circles unless the qualifier ‘guilty pleasure’ is applied. In this sense, ‘guilty pleasure’ operates concurrently with other forms of cultural control as an unconscious means to belittle and infantilise the target audiences of the media in question by presupposing that those who engage with said art without guilt have a stunted understanding of aesthetic quality.

In reality, the term ‘guilty pleasure’ is just a form of cultural armour – a way to engage with art, and yet maintain the visage that one understands what ‘good’ art is in the folk aesthetic. When stated out loud, it is a means to say: “Don’t worry, I know thing bad”.

That is the real pernicious thing about the concept of ‘guilty pleasures’. As Szalai contends in better words than mine: “I object to neither the pleasure, nor the guilt; it’s the modifying of one by the other that works my nerves, the awkward attempt to elevate as well as denigrate the object to which the phrase is typically assigned.”

The experience of guilty pleasure is one of insecurity in the face of perceived cultural pressure. As such, it can influence identity formation. An understanding of what is considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art is tied to the membership of certain groups, as well as the concept of coolness. As such, guilt surrounding one’s pleasures and the resultant need to identify them as guilty can often be tied to a fear of losing membership to one’s group or being allotted to the out-group.

Aesthetic taste – and thus the guilty pleasure – can also be tied to identity formation insofar as it can be an elitist means with which people can self-separate from the unwashed masses. Self-conceived expertise in what is and isn’t objectively good art can be used to elevate oneself above others. This is not defensible. As essayist Chuck Klosterman so savagely stated in an article for Esquire: “the only people who believe in some kind of universal taste – a consensual demarcation between what’s artistically good and what’s artistically bad – are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else’s art to validate their own limited worldview.”

From my experience, ‘guilty pleasure’ as a term is becoming less and less significant and ubiquitous. It may just be a reflection of where my life is right now – no longer an insecure teenager bespeckled with acne and poor life choices – but less and less I hear people (including myself) trying to validate a pleasure by acknowledging their guilt.

This is not to say that ‘guilty pleasure’ is dead or dying. Instead, I think it might be evolving. I often find myself internally having to check a guilty pleasure response or feeling the need to defend my right to find pleasure in something. Perhaps responding defensively to one’s pleasures being questioned, another means to assert one’s right to find pleasure in something, is a form of ‘guilty pleasure’ in disguise.

Getting over the guilt is a process. It is an unlearning of the desire to scoff, deride, or instantly judge. It is a process of learning to be curious, inquisitive, and accepting – learning to comprehend not why someone should defend their pleasure, but where they derive their pleasure from.

Next week I plan to write about one of my favourite anime series. It is a series that, if I didn’t know better, I would call a guilty pleasure. I plan not to defend its existence – even though there is a fair amount of the show that is problematic that will certainly come up in the discussion. Instead, I will discuss why it brings me so much pleasure and joy. I will follow the strong words of Chuck Klosterman: “It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it”.

This mindset clearly has its limits and problematics. I certainly would not like to hear about how someone’s favourite film is Birth of a Nation – and if they liked the film, it certainly would matter to me. Some pleasures, in their content or potential be damaging and inspire cruelty to disenfranchised peoples or groups, do matter and are unadvocatable (yes, I made up that word, get over it).

Privilege certainly intersects with this as well. For myself, the ability to advocate rather than defend is without a doubt tied to my existence as a cis-het male in a colonised country, a positioning and identity that is itself not questioned or required to be defended.

But, for the most part I think this mindset is positive. The targets of ‘guilty pleasure’ are generally not the media made for hegemonic audiences. Loving John Wick and other male-oriented content is met with little to no derision, whereas a love for Twilight or slash fiction could be reason enough to ridicule someone. Questioning of taste does not consequentially arise from those outside the hegemony, but from the groups that coordinate cultural significance and representation for their own ends – whether they intend to do so or do not.

Critical analysis of one’s own tastes is enlightening and gratifying – tied both to the process of understanding one’s own biases and getting to know oneself better. There are much more interesting discussions surrounding taste than who does or doesn’t have it. Aesthetic tastes are a window into a person’s character and their conscious and unconscious values. The reasons someone takes pleasure in a piece of media says more about them than the actual content of the media itself.

So, I say death to guilty pleasures.