What’s your guilty pleasure? It’s a question often tacked onto the end of interviews with celebrities who live otherwise seemingly perfect lives, a kooky question for the person to prove they’re sometimes naughty and flawed and human just like us. Perhaps most recently, Liam Gallagher revealed in Vogue’s 73 Questions – whilst walking around Hampstead Heath in a parka in blazing sunshine – that his guilty pleasure is Blur. (He also reveals, quicker than Eliud Kipchoge’s 2.52 minute mile, that his spirit animal is a dolphin, but that is a piece for another day.)
A guilty pleasure is something you can’t help but enjoy, even though you know it’s not generally held in high regard. Mine, for example, and much to most people’s chagrin, is listening to Christmas songs from September. For example, and not to sound like a modern-day Samuel Pepys or anything, but I sit here, writing this by soft candlelight, and listening to The Hives & Cyndi Lauper’s ‘A Christmas Duel’. No, I’m not writing this in the future – it’s Sunday 13th October. You might be slightly taken aback at my soundtrack choice – even slightly displeased, I’ll allow it – but chances are you don’t think I’ve compromised my moralistic integrity. Sure, it’s a pleasure I’m definitely in the minority of enjoying all year round, but I’ve not killed a man, have I? And this is true of most guilty pleasures: they’re usually totally innocuous.
In stark contrast, the heart of ‘guilt’ lies in the heady feelings of regret and shame. Shame arrives – often with a banging headache on a Sunday morning – when you’ve violated some kind of standard. These standards can be one you’ve set yourself, but most often it’s those of others that we’ve just absorbed, usually without consciously recognising it happening. The latter is ordinarily the way with guilty pleasures, because if it violated your own personally set standards, it wouldn’t ever count as a pleasure for you in the first place; it would fall at the first hurdle. This means a guilty pleasure is something you authentically draw boundless joy from, but want to suppress or conceal because of how other people will judge you for it. And when you put it like that, doesn’t it sound like a pretty bizarre concept?
But what is the purpose of the guilt in these scenarios? What’s the rationale behind all of these standards we’re battling against, other than that they’re something a lot of people just happen to agree on? (It’s an important and hopefully obvious caveat here that there’s a different between guilty pleasures and problematic faves, which is a whole other ballgame.) The answer is: there isn’t any. No-one’s actually laid out any hard and fast rules about the pleasures you feel guilty about, because they’re totally harmless. If you’re deriving joy from it, what’s the damn problem? A survey a couple of years ago reported watching Disney films as an adult, viewing Keeping Up With The Kardashians, listening to the Spice Girls as an adult, biting both ends of a Cadbury’s finger and sucking tea through it like a straw, and buying yourself flowers as being amongst the top 50 guilty pleasures of Brits (at #s 3, 36, 37, 48 and 21 respectively). How many of those should really, truly elicit guilt? How many of those are totally indefensible? Are you really going to cry mea culpa at any of those?
Plus, do you see the pattern emerging? The emphasis on as an adult is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting there. The Little Mermaid is totally fine until the clock strikes 12 on your 18th birthday; at which point you must sequester your DVDs away until you have children who may want to watch. And god forbid you could now listen to 2 Become 1 and finally understand the lyric “Be a bit wiser baby; put it on, put it on”, a line about contraception which totally flew over your 11-year-old head at the time. Number 49 on the list was playing on the games console when the kids aren’t around to catch you – because the only game we’re allowed to play now is the game of LIFE.
This is why I want to flip guilty pleasures on their head. Instead of burying our joy in front of others, let’s revel in it. Let’s be unapologetic with it. Let’s cling onto childlike glee wherever we can glean it, and cultivate it so lovingly and guiltlessly that we encourage everyone else to do it too. Let’s get rid of the notion of guilty pleasures and instead keep the things that light us up the most in a place where they’re safe and sacred and secure. I now treat guilty pleasures as shameless treasures – will you join me?
This is the first in Ellie Kime’s new series debunking guilty pleasure
