The Guilty Pleasure is All Mine

On behalf of unbaked sleeves of Toll House cookies and the peroxided humanoid that is Guy Fieri, let me just say: I do not believe in guilty pleasures. The concept offends me. I don’t like how it’s used to explain urges to devour ice cream straight from the freezer and peanut butter spooned out of a jar and Joe Manganiello—no utensil necessary. I don’t like how it gobbles up things I enjoy in private and spits them out into the cold, harsh light of the day. It’s not that I’m some crazed hedonist. I’m too Jewish to do drugs or strangers with abandon. I really like steel-cut oatmeal. But I’m no ascetic either.

Neither is Julieanne Smolinski. As part of The Cut’s brilliantly titled “ME ME ME ME ME” series, the writer documented a week of unbridled indulgence for public consumption. Her account is a carnival of debauched behavior and wish fulfillment and porn, and it’s very fun to read. Like marathons of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila or your refusal to share a giant funnel cake with your needy brother at Playland, the report is satisfying and selfish and somewhat sickening. It is a kind of delicious and a kind of terrible. It goes down very easy.

And yet after recounting seven glorious days of unchecked and unremorseful decadence, Smolinski arrives at an unexpected conclusion. The purpose of pleasure, she asserts, is “to distract from misery, and when pleasure is misery, there is no hydrating Gatorade, no Canyon Ranch, no methadone for it.” That is, there is no joy in the pleasure we seek to punish ourselves. So, why is it so hard to see that?

“Why do we abstain from things?” she asks. What motivates us to swear off what makes us happy or to (maybe rightly) limit our experiences of gratification? What is the value of abstinence? Do we hold ourselves to maybe unfair societal standards in order to protect ourselves from destruction? What makes it so hard to just accept goodness in our lives and in moderation? And why are we are so compelled to take something wonderful — like sugar or chocolate or Channing Tatum — and exaggerate it to the point of personal embarrassment? It all seems very American to me.

I suppose I am more curious in this season than I might otherwise be, because I suspect that too many of us (Hi, hello! Me!) have turned real love into a guilty, gross pleasure. In our age of cynicism and ennui, I worry we’ve made genuine emotional feeling into a furtive pursuit, a Hallmark-laced cliché.

So, why is sentiment such a guilty pleasure these days? Why do I apologize for it? Is it because Valentine’s Day encourages an excess of love and sweets? Is it because it seems silly to overdose on an emotion for a single day that we should be celebrating every morning and eve of the year? And how do you feel about indulgence in general? Let’s have a conversation heart (or a trillion) about it.