I’m giving up on guilty pleasures.
Not the things I like that might be considered to be guilty pleasures—no, I’m outlawing the phrase, the concept of having guilty pleasures, because there should be no shame involved in enjoying something, even if it’s objectively bad (or otherwise panned by others).
Harry Styles, a member of the boyband One Direction, released his first solo album in the spring of this year. I’d always liked a handful of One Direction songs but filed them way far back in the darkest corner of my guilty pleasure file back when I was too focused on building a Cool and Sophisticated (and, ultimately, pretentious) taste in music. No room for boy bands there!
And then I realized there’s nothing wrong with grooving to catchy songs packed with sweet harmonies and the occasional power pop guitar riff. That opened the “what even is a guilty pleasure, anyway” floodgates. And I’m glad I let go of my hangups, because otherwise, I might not have listened to Styles’ album—already an all-time favorite. I’ve been singing its praises to anyone I think might even have a sliver of interest in it, and I’m sure it’s annoying, but that’s the great thing about living a guilty pleasure-free life! I don’t care.
The Spice Girls, figure skating and award shows are all reformed guilty pleasures. Yeah, I’ll live-tweet dress opinions during the red carpet pre-shows and then get indignant when my faves lose what amounts to a completely meaningless and arbitrary award—I still hold (or, really, irrationally and hopelessly cling to) a grudge against the Emmys for shutting out the HBO miniseries Show Me A Hero last year, and I may never know true peace until Jonathan Banks of Breaking Bad and, now, its spinoff Better Call Saul finally wins the Best Supporting Actor award.
I feel the same about questionable sequels to otherwise acclaimed horror films (any of the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels all come to mind), ’90s teen films (Clueless, The Craft) and definitely the reality TV shows that dominated VH1 and MTV during the late ’00s and early 2010’s. The celebrity Bachelor-type shows were inescapable—Flavor of Love, which centered on Public Enemy hype man Flavor Flav’s search for love, spawned a spinoff, I Love New York (Tiffany “New York” Pollard, a Flavor of Love runner up, starred in two seasons), which was responsible for two OTHER spinoffs that featured different I Love New York contestants. Then, for the hair metal crowd, there was Rock of Love, starring Bret Michaels of the band Poison.
I was addicted to those shows in college, and I’ve gone back to watch them multiple times online. I still don’t know what it is about them—maybe it’s just the manufactured drama, or the over-the-top mansions the shows are filmed in, but they are fun.
Of course, it’s not lost on me that many of these are things that might be associated with teen girls, which is part of a larger problem—that this society has painted young women as tasteless, shrieking followers of anything shiny and new. Things they’re fans of are often derided by our culture at large (One Direction, NSYNC, and, at one time, even The Beatles), and, as a result, we might be predisposed to rag on or hide our affection for something that is stereotypically feminine without realizing it. And I’m certainly guilty of that. It took years through middle school and high school before rejecting the idea that femininity and girly things are lesser.
A teen girl screaming at Harry Styles or Paul McCartney is not far removed from a grown man bringing a sign to a Springsteen concert and “BRUUUUUCE”-ing for four hours (full disclosure: I am also a giant Bruce dweeb).
People enjoy different things in different ways, but loving something is the same for all of us at its most basic level—an album or book or show resonates for whatever reason. We should be able to like what we like without feeling judged.
She Said, She Said is Samantha Sciarrotta’s monthly column for the Hamilton Post.,
