I and my colleagues around the sugarhigh! headquarters have been maintaining for quite some time (going back to the very first issue of the zine) that, as regards aesthetic consumption, the idea of "guilty pleasure" was proper not to the psychology of individuals but to class war. Always about slumming with the tastes of masses, as a term -- as an available concept -- it's a way of showing one recognizes the inferiority of pop, while still allowing oneself the pleasures found there. Just like irony!
Now it turns out that this analysis is simply a a commonly-held fact -- not the fact that rich people are the dominant market for gossip mags, but that this revelation is a story about class-based fantasies of taste. Phew. Now that the battle of understanding is over, could everybody please stop using the term, or at least recognize what it is you're participating in, every time you invoke it?
Posted by jane at June 8, 2004 08:10 AM | TrackBacki appreciate the thought here--and this is not a prelude to, *but you've got it all wrong.* the term in consideration is a peeve of mine, for reasons that differ from your observations. i suppose, though, there is some relation. use of this term signifies to me an insincere sort of self-deprecation that is connected to (sub-)high-school self-consciousness: at all costs, one must appear to have good taste, and in this frame of mind (the one that uses this term), good taste is defined by what one's peers are into. in other words, a step in the right direction is the embrace of personal taste, assuming it's sincere. there's always an inverse danger, though, of embracing things primarily because most people think they're uncool. this was blown up in the age of irony, with the new batch of '90s grownups-in-waiting grasping onto lame shit from their adolescences with sentimental desperation (crappy tv shows and cartoons, long discontinued/failed action figures and snack products, stoopid albums, bad outfits).
i meander. i'm trying to say that i find "guilty pleasures" loaded in a pointless way--ie, if you can admit that you like something you think is detestable or uninteresting to others, you can get over the perceived stigma of liking such "uncouth" stuff, and i suspect that when people use this term, they're subwittingly trying to subvert uncoolness in the same way that they might have held onto their he-man action figures in high school (dude, he-man is so gay s&m! but i like it anyway. no one understands me). everybody wants to be liked, no matter how much he dislikes himself, even if he's merely admired for being unlikeable.
ray gonne
Posted by: ray gonne at June 9, 2004 08:37 PM