BAN #154: Guilty pleasures

[Saturn image credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute / Gordan Ugarkovic]

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Apropos of nothing

Not everything needs to be themed

A topic that keeps coming up in my life — and I bet yours, too — is the idea of a “guilty pleasure”. Like, “I love the music of ABBA. Listening to it is a guilty pleasure.”

But… why? Why feel guilty? The tacit admission here is that society at large or some subsection of it frowns on the object of your pleasure. OK, but still, why feel guilty about it?

Mind you, another tacit part of this expression is that the pleasure is something minor, and not something huge. You’re not admitting to some horrid act that gives you pleasure, like shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. In that particular and quite extreme case (and many more like it; I’m sure you can think of a few) I would suggest there may be some need for mental health help. But I don’t mean anything like that; I mean instead things that are generally limited to things like music, food, or mass media.

For the first two (music and food), my feelings are strong, and I’ve made them clear for years: There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Whatever music you like, you like. It’s subjective, and no two people have exactly the same taste, or get exactly the same thing out of a particular piece of music or song. You like rap? Cool! It’s not my thing, but I get that it’s yours. You think that classical is boring? OK. I might want to drill down a bit and see if you’re talking about baroque (where I’d agree with you!) or 20th Century romantics, in which case let me introduce you to some rafter-shaking Shostakovich. But either way, if it’s not your thing, it’s not your thing.

Same with food. I love cilantro, but of course a lot of people say it tastes like soap. That sucks for them, but it’s almost literally the way they’re wired. I loathe cucumbers, and I’ve told this to people and received condescension for it. That’s weird. Why would you mock someone for the food they like or dislike?

The only exception I can think of easily is when you’re eating a food that’s not all that healthy for you. It’s a pleasure, and you feel guilty for eating it. But in this case, hey, there’s moderation. I love chocolate and salty snacks, but I need to be careful about how much of them I eat. I’ve looked at my diet and have figured out how much ice cream I can have after dinner, how often I can have chips with lunch, and so on. That way those things are just pleasures, and I don’t have to feel guilty about them.

[Note: I have been more aware over the past few years that a lot of my opinions on things need re-examining due to them being formed under parochial circumstances, what a lot of folks refer to as privilege (a term I don’t actually like, but that’s another story). So, am I missing something here? Is there something I’m missing because I’m a white middle-aged middle-class relatively able-bodied man with limited exposure to other cultures and/or populations? I’m always curious to learn about that, so if so, please leave a comment to that effect!]

I would say the same thing for mass media (books, TV, movies, etc.) in general, but with the caveat that again if your pleasure is derived from something like watching cock fights, then maybe it’s time to look into that a little deeper. But if you like old black and white scifi movies, or soap operas, or game shows, or whatever, well that’s just fine. I still have a love for “Space:1999” that goes well beyond my tastes for scifi now.

As a friend of mine once said to me, “You’re not responsible for the music you listened to when you were 15.”

I’d extrapolate that to any age. And if you still listen to that kind of music — as I do, because above I used the example of ABBA with malice aforethought — that’s OK. It’s music. It affects us deeply, profoundly, and there is a connection to our younger selves there. There are songs you may enjoy now that you loved when you were a kid but, if you heard for the first time today, you’d shriek and change the station. Well, fine. Accept that, ponder it if you’d like, but you may also want to relax and just roll with it.

I write this because it came up again on Twitter. My pal Mara Wilson tweeted thusly:

(Click that to see the short thread.)

I had to laugh; I know a lot of snobs (again, I love classical music), but I have tried very hard to lose all my pretense about music… and my own age is perilously close to the age she chose for the tweet. So I replied:

Click that to read our short conversation that followed.

My point: Drop the guilt. Enjoy the pleasure.

And while you do, I’ll be over here listening to the Monkees and ABBA and some MCU soundtracks and snacking on a Charleston Chew and maybe a Tootsie Roll. Guilt-free and happily.

Or, to phrase it differently:

Love what you love, and let others love what they love.

Et alia

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