Some people describe shows or movies or other stories they return to as guilty pleasures. I don’t approve of “guilty pleasures” as an idea. As a term it can describe several scenarios so I’ll approach each one.

Generally, a guilty pleasure is a work of culture you enjoy but feel you shouldn’t. This has two possibilities. Either (1) you like it in spite of not fitting the target demographic (wrong age, culture, social group) or (2) thinking it is /wrong/ to like it.

In the first case, I think nobody should feel bad. Target audiences are marketing tactics, not genetic fiats. We enjoy stories in part because they speak to us. No one can perfectly predict what audience will connect with what author.

Stories are tools for communication and anchoring. If you found something that stabilizes you and enables you to speak, how can anyone declare that wrong? Anyone who would demean you is cruel and misguided.

The most visible and positive version of this is surely Brony culture. My Little Pony: Friend is Magic is a successful tv show targeted towards young girls, but its themes of friendship and respect resonated with adult male audiences, self-styled Bronies.

Bronies were widely and unfairly* mocked by critics for liking something girly. But, thought experiment, how would you, dear reader, mock someone like this without resorting to grotesque waves of toxic masculinity?

Of course, you can’t think of one, because there aren’t any valid reasons to dismiss appreciation for well-made stories about friends, and everything else that show touches upon.

“Social pressure” isn’t a valid excuse either. Stories, in the writing AND the reading, are expressions of humanity, and it is no justification for alienating your humanity that everyone else tells you to.

Everyone pressing Friends, The Office, Spongebob has neither improved nor degraded their quality nor relevance. No great movement has risen to dismiss them, even as their myriad flaws are noted. Are they really anymore deserving of a pass than Riverdale? VampireDiaries? Twilight?

WITH ALL THAT BEING SAID, I do have a few notes. “You shouldn’t feel guilty for connecting with something” is a statement I make a priori. LIKING the story isn’t a sin, and should incur no guilt. But ignoring the flaws is deeply sinful and that brings us to (2).

If you feel that it is actually /wrong/ to like something then that feeling is something you need to tackle outright. Answer first, why does it feel wrong? Does it propagate dangerous themes and stereotypes? Does it exploit someone vulnerable to tell its story?

Dan Brown’s thrillers might be guilty pleasures for some, as they are pulpy breezy airport fiction, but are they illustrative of bad ideas? Well, they fail to distinguish fact and fiction, caricaturize outgroups for villains, and insecure takes on civilian-authority interaction.

I think you shouldn’t feel bad for enjoying airport fiction, firstly. But if you find those elememtd disagreeable, you should engage with them outright. Don’t suppress them, or let them ruin your pleasure. Recognize them, stay cognizant of them, and cautiously proceed.

Stories are a clever tool of transmitting information. You understand the lessons of the tortoise and the hare a lot better with the associated story than if the moral were dictated. Ditto for the scorpion and the frog. Stories allow for ideas to be implanted without us noticing.

But this is obviously dangerous. If you don’t stay aware of the ideas stories try to implant, you’ll slowly, accidentally start telling yourself that Caesar is an honorable man.

I’m not sure where we stand on the Transformers films, but they rake in billions from children even while endorsing racism, sexism, and something bordering on adult-minor relationships. And we avoid the guilt by calling them bad, while funding decades of sequels.

This clearly is a lesson that extends far beyond guilty pleasures. Has anyone expressed guilt for enjoying Friends and its attendant queerphobia? Does anyone feel bad for rioting to keep it present?

Repenting isnt required, and neither is an essay per se,but uncritically rejoicing in cruel stereotypes is obviously wrong.
The key point here is that for this kind of guilty pleasure, I still don’t approve of guilt, as its how we justify failing to actively combat bad messaging.

The onus is on individuals to go further than “I like this but know I shouldn’t,” and to isolate why they feel they shouldn’t, and work through it so that they /can/ enjoy it. As I said, expressions of humanity can’t be readily dismissed.

Another onus falls on us to encourage this kind of out loud discussion of our culture. Twitter has supported the superficial version of this, but on a more intimate level, in our friend groups, we should go deeper.

When someone says “I like The Office,” (and the moment is right, of course) ask why, and how they feel about its veiled prejudices. Its more interesting than just reading out a list of your Facebook likes anyway.

An interesting case study and coda to this thread is Harry Potter. For a while it (seemed like it) was the solitary lens through which a whole generation saw the world. Neatly categorizing people into 4 groups, or 2 groups, and lumping cultures together very Eurocentrically.

This is of course wildly inaccurate, and needed massive correction, in part by reading other books. And that generation slowly obliged, because they’d been taught that evil can always be overcome by rigorous study teamwork, and elitist privilege. That was implanted too.