(Untitled)

[maria_sputnik]

What's up with "guilty pleasures

Comments

[trixiefirecat]

d) a self-conscious way to express that you realize this thing you like isn't exactly representative of the height of taste, but an admission that you do like it anyway.

[maria_sputnik]

That's the part that's interesting, though, the double consciousness that

a) I like it and
b) I perceive it as not worthy of being liked.

Do we have two centers of taste?

[trixiefirecat]

sincerity and pretension.

[congogirl]

perfect explanation.

[claudelemonde]

i think all the posited answers, including trixie's, are valid

i like no doubt even though i know they're crap, uncool, and tacky. i still like 'em.

some food items i like because they are delicious but i know symbolically that they are "bad for me" and therefore i shouldn't EAT them--but there is no injunction like "you shouldn't LIKE the taste of cupcakes," so the pleasure bit, the taste, is not expressly prohibited but tangentially so

[maria_sputnik]

Like I was sayin' to trixie, though -- how can you perceive no doubt as both "crap" and "totally likeable"? Do you have more than one approval center in your brain?

With cupcakes I think it is a different story, WE LOVE THE CUPCAKE, but perhaps we don't love what the cupcake wreaks on us? Plus, forbidden sensual pleasures taste twice as good.

[congogirl]

internal and external. That's where pretension comes in - we care what we think other people like and what they think we like.

[trixiefirecat]

yeah, i actually think it's the same taste, and how you choose whether or not to be self-conscious about it when admitting it to others. a guilty pleasure is only defined by our human sense of competition, i think. otherwise why would we care?

b)

[substitute]

You're an upper class person who likes lower-class things but is afraid of being perceived as lower-class.

[maria_sputnik]

Sort of, kind of, maybe, not precisely. In my case I think it's more denial-of-hipsterism.

?

[antiabecedarian]

[maria_sputnik]

oh dear

Totally "b"

[diemoniker]

As in: mac and cheese out of the box. Also: As in when I was at a gay nightclub the other night, and someone started talking about how she cried at a particular dramatic drag re-enactment of a Tori Amos song, and I found myself physically incapable of expressing even the tiniest amount of solidarity or even admitting that I had ever owned a Tori Amos album, let alone three, because I was afraid that my larger peer group would smell my admission in the wind and send gorillatigers to dismember me. Or perhaps the gorillatigers of my OWN SOUL would do the work.

[maria_sputnik]

See, the gorillatigers of your soul hate Tori Amos. So who is it that bought all those record albums? That's what I'm sayin'.