#16 Guilty pleasures

A teaching moment

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This edition I’m writing about guilty pleasures. The existence of them, the interplay between guilt and pleasure, and some of my own guilty pleasures. Fun!

Mucho amor,

Belle X

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Lots of Sunday mornings, when I’m lying in bed, sometimes with a hangover, a dry mouth, the rising sweet smell of coconut-y fake tan and sweat and absolutely drowning in waves of nausea and anxiety, because I was yelling too loud or I said something I shouldn’t have. Other times feeling fine and maybe a little quiet or ponderous.
But lots of Sundays all the same, I open Facebook and navigate to a page called ‘Colin’s Friends’ to watch a woman and her teenaged kid go live from their car.
This woman (Jennifer) a midwestern mom, started the Facebook page 8 years ago to help her son, who at the time was an 11-year-old boy with no friends.
His name is Colin, and he is 18 now and of course, he’s much too cool (and presumably moody) to go live on Facebook with his mum.
So these days, it’s just Jennifer and her other kid (Ella) who have any sort of presence on ‘Colin’s Friends’.  

The general theme of these weekly videos does not deviate; at the beginning the phone is being wrangled into some kind of selfie stick, Jennifer invariably apologises for being late, the pair of them are eating fast food from Gloria Jean’s or McDonalds or Starbucks.

And while they eat, they chat about what they’ve been up to that week; mundane normal people things, because they are endearingly, achingly normal. They go to their jobs, do schoolwork, eat takeout and sometimes punctuate the hum drum with a visit to a friend’s house. Ella is non-binary and wears really wild face makeup, which sometimes looks ahead of their time and sometimes looks like they’ve taken to their eyelids with a sharpie. Their fringe is dramatically parted to the side and they appraise the audience with a healthy degree of eye rolling disdain for a kid of their age.

Anyway, this sweet, often monotonous chat and the intermittent chewing of fries, slurping of diet coke, even an occasional burp, is the soundtrack to many a Sunday morning for me. Observing this family as they grow older and hearing about their ordinary lives is one of my truest guilty pleasures.  

And I guess it got me thinking about guilty pleasures altogether. The complex recipe behind them and moments when the guilt is valid versus socially suggested.

There’s been a recent backlash against guilty pleasures. Lots of people believe they’re an archaic quasi-religious throwback or that describing something as a guilty pleasure is just a way to deride the cultural domain of women and poor people. Salting enjoyable things with guilt is an interesting cultural phenomenon and pronouncing that something is your “guilty pleasure” is a good trick. It divorces you from the negative implications of the thing. “I know how bad this is” you say, “but I love it anyway”. You maintain your role as an arbiter of culture while you roll around in the pig pen with the plebs who enjoy shopping at Kmart and watching Real Housewives. Clever!  

Of course, from a less cynical perspective. Sloughing away the guilt from the pleasure is probably a public service and the burgeoning cultural phenomenon that now sees people openly talking about their love of Real Housewives, or recounting their night on MDMA, or sharing discount codes for vibrators on their Instagram accounts is commendable and worthy. It’s a fight worth fighting, to be sure.  After all, if it’s pleasurable and you aren’t hurting anyone, why the guilt?

But I also suspect that there is something in the way we are programmed, that to really feel the pleasure of the experience, the sting of guilt must nip at its heels just a little bit. It feels uniquely risqué and delicious to stand at the open fridge door, illuminated by its phosphorescent glow and stuff a Lindt ball into your mouth when you’ve been espousing strict veganism for years. Decidedly more pleasurable than practicing yoga or drinking a green smoothie.

I think it’s probably pertinent to think about whether guilt is the right word. Perhaps these moments are sometimes better described as humiliating pleasures because in some cases, all we’re concerned about is the perception of what we’re taking pleasure in. What would people think if they knew I was reading 50 Shades of Grey or that I’ve never seen Citizen Cane etc. These things aren’t inherently hurting anyone, but they do suggest a departure from good taste.
Guilt doesn’t necessarily require the appraisal of others and lots of people argue that it’s a healthy internal tool to measure your behaviour against your ethics. You feel guilty about your road rage or all the selfies you take, despite how good these acts might feel in the moment. Chris Brown, McDonalds, fast fashion. People derive pleasure from these things all the time, and yet I would argue that any guilt encountered is a symptom of a departure from your ethics, rather than from good taste (although that too).

A selfie!

I think part of what I’m trying to find a lot of the time, is balance. And a lot of the time I feel I lack it. I give myself such a hard time, I can give others such a hard time, too. My self-flagellation for taking selfies or getting my eyebrows shaped for example, is steeped in an aversion to vanity which I think is ultimately good, but also, I am a woman in a world that has taught me my appearance is paramount. The pleasure of preening is worthy of both guilt and understanding.

Asking yourself, when something feels both good and wrong, whether you’re needlessly embarrassed about your taste in literature or whether you’ve actually gone against your values, is healthy. It’s the kind of introspection that allows you to move closer to who you want to be. You’re allowed to derive pleasure from being a bit shit (McDonalds, selfies, road rage) and you’re allowed to want to be a better person (McDonalds, selfies, road rage).

What can I say? Balance, baby.