Why There Can Be No Guilty Pleasures

There is probably no other term that makes my neck hairs burn. Guilty pleasures. Everyone seems to have them. The English professor who likes to watch Three’s Company reruns. The sound engineer for a national arts radio network who likes to read comic books on the sly. The basketball phenom who, when no one is looking, sneaks out to go bowling. The monster truck driver who puts Abba on his iPod. The hobo who sometimes eats his campfire stew with a fork instead of a spoon. The social misfits who can’t quite close off avenues of enjoyment that would cost them their social status if anyone were to find out.

As a poet who is immersed in pop culture, I suppose I’m expected to have more than my share of guilty pleasures. But I don’t. Here’s why.

First of all, the term is overused. I hate being a cliché, so I wouldn’t say I had a guilty pleasure even if I did. I would at least find another more interesting term. Mind you, that need to stand out makes me a bit of a snob.

Second of all, the term ‘guilty pleasure’ makes the person who uses it sound like a snob. Probably because when they use the term they are being a snob. To say you have a guilty pleasure is to say that you have a form of enjoyment that you feel is beneath you.

Third of all, you’re not feeling guilt, you’re feeling shame. Guilt has to do with committing an immoral or unethical act. Shame is all about losing face and social standing. So if someone said they had a shameful pleasure I would have to nod in agreement at their precision, if not their opinion about themselves. That is, unless they told me they had happened to kill someone with an axe to the head and discovered they had enjoyed it. That would be a guilty pleasure and I would defer to their linguistic acumen. But until I find myself smilingly washing my hands of blood in the bathroom sink, I refuse to have any guilty pleasures.

Maybe it’s because I’m a poet (which is at least three pay grades below hobo) that I can’t have guilty pleasures. After all, you can’t look down on anything if it’s all above you. But I unfortunately know too many poets who have scads of guilty pleasures. This proves that you can have a guilty pleasure no matter how low you are on the social scale. Many poets, while making no money, often see themselves as culturally superior to those who waft money and power around. The culture of ostentatious consumption is full of totems and icons that poets, artists and others see as culturally deficient. And to be a poet whose eyes have begun to linger over passing SUV’s is to be a person with a dark secret in the middle of an environmentally conscious, anti-capitalist crowd.

Of course, the cultural lapses may happen in any number of ways and directions. You can see this in a film like Educating Rita, recently released on DVD. In this film, Dr. Frank Bryant has reached the end with his pampered snobbish students. He’s become lost in his own subculture and no longer wants any part of it. He gradually drinks himself out of a job by acting like a lower class lout. Meanwhile, he’s developed an interest in one of his Open University students, Rita – who eventually wants to be called Susan because that sounds like the type of name a more cultured person might have. She has to hide the shame of going to university classes from her working class husband and kin because they wouldn’t look too kindly on her new found interests. In this case, education is her guilty pleasure. And through the course of their interactions, Rita/Susan actually becomes Frank’s guilty pleasure. He wants her to stay rough and unspoiled with a creative energy and brutal directness that hasn’t been sapped by intellectual life.

It’s that energy that many people find in their guilty pleasures – that thing they had to leave behind in order to assume the social role they have worked hard to attain. But in every role, something is missing. No individual can perfectly fill their role, even if they’ve chosen it for themselves. A song we can’t admit to liking trickles into our ears and babbles like a musical brook in our thoughts all day. A B-movie full of stop-action animated monsters that thrilled us as a child comes on late night TV and we sit bathed in the warm familiar flickers we remember from a long ago matinee.

You can tell what aspects of the self a person has had to sacrifice by what they label as their guilty pleasures. It’s a sad but, many would say, necessary cultural rite of passage to leave things that used to please us behind. But why do we do it? In fact, as I’ve pointed out, the very existence of ‘guilty pleasures’ proves that we don’t leave things behind. We only claim we have. The only way we can fill a role we’ve chosen for ourselves is to lie to everyone and lie to ourselves. Luckily, we are good at both of those things.

The unthinkable alternative would be to embrace everything we like and make no apologies. This is something I am trying on a lifelong basis. Mind you, I hate many things and I’m indifferent to many others. But I think it’s worth trying to be truthful about what we do like and what we don’t. (Maybe at another time I’ll say something about how we pretend to accept many parts of our assigned roles that make us acutely uncomfortable.) Why not simply say we (okay, I) still listen to Abba and The Partridge Family? Why not make a point of championing Ishtar (as one of my friends often does)?

You see, the real danger is that you might convince yourself that you don’t like something you actually do like. You will have achieved the next possible stage of evolution – the reprogrammable robot. Of course, the other possibility is to transcend roles altogether, but I can tell by the way you’re quietly shoving your Archie comic books under your bed with your foot that you aren’t ready for that yet.