What’s Your Guilty Pleasure?
Go ahead, indulge a little . . . I said, a little
You’ve got yours, and I’ve got mine.
From trashy TV and junk food to impulse shopping and reading for fun, the guilty pleasure doesn’t have to carry as much guilt as we once thought. Perhaps it’s time to smother the guilty pleasure in a frosting of as you wish.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Sami Schalk an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “A guilty pleasure is something that we enjoy, but we know we’re either not supposed to like, or that liking it says something negative about us.”
The guilt surrounding pleasure is a crazy connection. The idea that we can’t simply enjoy an activity — that is harming no one! — without struggling with our feelings of shame and guilt, I mean, where did that come from?
According to Dr. Schalk, we see pleasure as “sinful and bad and self-indulgent.” As a society, we tend to struggle with the idea of perfectionism and all that entails, such as not wasting time and being the best version of ourselves. For most of us being the best version of ourselves doesn’t include creeping people on Facebook or drinking milk out of the carton.
