Don’t Hide Your Guilty Pleasures

When it comes to the media we consume, the thought of revealing our guilty pleasures to the world sounds like social self-sabotage. Nobody really wants to reveal their love for Avril Lavigne, sappy romantic comedies, or cheap tabloid magazines.

Now, while everyone’s idea of a guilty pleasure is unique, all guilty pleasures seem to follow a common theme; they make you scared to feel superficial.

Not many people are brave enough to list their secret love for the Kardashians in their Tinder bio or talk openly about the hours of makeup tutorials they’ve binged on Instagram. For myself, I know I’m far more willing to voice my opinions on the literature I’ve been reading than I am to discuss the ongoing dramatics of my favourite Grey’s Anatomy characters.

Although I’m aware that my enjoyment of one doesn’t take away from the other, I still find myself pretending that I only have interest in entertainment that makes me appear smarter. What is it that makes us feel so guilty about looking a little superfluous?

The fear we experience is derived from the fear of appearing the same as the person next to us. Everybody wants to feel like an individual; we find ourselves wearing shirts for bands we don’t really like, feigning interest in documentaries that bore us, and trying to chime in on conversations about politics that we aren’t really following.

What we fail to realize is that this mass distaste for the mainstream isn’t about actually disliking the things we think are mainstream, it’s about trying to prove to ourselves—and to everyone around us—that we are too intelligent to like the same things as the average consumer. Our desire to feel intelligent often has nothing to do with a desire for acquiring knowledge and everything to do with a desire to look knowledgeable.

From a certain perspective, we can see this desire for what it really is: an integral part in the structure of classism. Everyone thinks that having the most intelligent tastes, or the most niche interests, is going to make them somehow better than others. If you look down on yourself for enjoying things that seem unintelligent, it means that you’re also looking down on everyone else who also enjoys the same thing.

The desire to appear scholarly in order to set yourself apart won’t actually make you any smarter, it’s only going to enforce the classist ideal that intellectualism belongs to the upper class, and that to belong to any other social class is humiliating.

Ironically, in supporting the system of classism, you’re just throwing yourself back into mainstream society. The guilt associated with feeling a little bit silly from time to time isn’t going to stop you from enjoying frivolous media, and pretending you don’t like it isn’t going to set you apart from the mainstream. In fact, it will only do the exact opposite.

So instead of trying to hide your less highbrow tastes, slap on an old episode of Glee, blast pop music from the loudest speakers you own, and tell society to peddle its guilt elsewhere.