There's No Such Thing as a Guilty Pleasure — But We Keep Pretending There Is

The Phrase That Gives the Game Away

Every time someone says "guilty pleasure," they're making a confession that has nothing to do with the show or song they're about to mention. What they're actually confessing is that they've internalized someone else's judgment about what's worth enjoying — and they're preemptively apologizing for disagreeing with it.

"It's my guilty pleasure" translates, pretty cleanly, to: I know this isn't supposed to be good, but I like it anyway, and I need you to know that I know.

That disclaimer is doing a lot of social work. It signals cultural awareness. It performs a kind of self-awareness that protects you from being lumped in with people who enjoy the thing without irony. It's a hedge. And it reveals, more than anything, that the hierarchy of entertainment taste is alive and well — we've just gotten more sophisticated about how we enforce it.

The New Snobbery Doesn't Wear a Tuxedo

Old-school cultural gatekeeping was easy to identify. It wore elbow patches and talked about opera. It had a name and an address: highbrow culture, which looked down on everything popular, commercial, or mass-produced.

The new version is harder to pin down because it doesn't look like snobbery. It looks like taste. It looks like having opinions.

Today's cultural hierarchy isn't really about high art versus low art. It's about which kinds of popular culture are considered smart-popular versus dumb-popular. Prestige TV is fine. Reality TV is embarrassing. Indie music is credible. Top 40 pop requires an asterisk. Literary fiction is serious. Romance novels are a punchline — until someone decides to take them seriously in a New Yorker essay, at which point they become "underrated."

The categories shift, but the underlying logic stays the same: some entertainment is worth claiming in public, and some is best kept private.

Class Is Always in the Room

Here's something the conversation about entertainment taste almost never says directly: taste hierarchies are class hierarchies. They always have been.

The things that get labeled "lowbrow" or "guilty pleasure" tend to be the things that are most popular with working-class audiences, with younger demographics, with communities that don't have a lot of cultural gatekeeping power. Reality TV. Pop country. Telenovelas. Fast-food chain restaurant culture. Certain video game genres. Fanfiction.

The things that get to be unironically respected tend to be the things that require either money to access or a certain kind of cultural education to appreciate. A $200 concert ticket for a critically acclaimed artist is a cultural experience. A $20 ticket to a county fair concert is a guilty pleasure.

This isn't about quality. It's about who gets to define quality, and whose enjoyment gets to count.

Bourdieu called this "cultural capital" back in the 1970s, and the concept hasn't aged a day. The ability to demonstrate good taste — meaning the taste that the dominant culture has decided is good — is a form of social currency. People spend it and protect it accordingly.

The Internet Promised to Fix This (It Didn't)

When the internet went mainstream, a lot of critics and cultural commentators predicted that it would democratize taste. No more gatekeepers. No more editors deciding what was worth covering. The people would decide, and the people liked all kinds of things.

And in some ways, this happened. Fandoms that used to be niche or embarrassing — anime, K-pop, romance fiction, competitive gaming — now have massive, visible, culturally influential communities. Things that would have been dismissed a decade ago are now legitimate industries.

But the internet didn't eliminate taste hierarchies. It multiplied them. Now instead of one dominant cultural hierarchy, there are thousands of micro-hierarchies operating simultaneously, each with its own internal logic about what counts as authentic versus sellout, underground versus mainstream, real versus commercial.

Being a casual fan is now almost as stigmatized as not being a fan at all. Knowing all the lore is good. Owning the merch ironically is acceptable. Owning it sincerely requires a disclaimer. The gatekeeping didn't disappear. It just became more granular.

The Generational Fault Line

There's an interesting generational split happening around all of this that's worth paying attention to.

Older millennials and Gen X tend to still operate with something closer to the old hierarchy — a residual sense that there's a difference between "real" culture and entertainment, between things worth taking seriously and things that are just fun. They're more likely to reach for the "guilty pleasure" framing.

Younger millennials and Gen Z, on the other hand, have largely rejected the premise. The dominant ethos in those cohorts is that all entertainment is valid on its own terms, that sincerity is cooler than irony, and that gatekeeping is cringe. Taylor Swift is as worthy of serious analysis as Bob Dylan. The Bachelor is as culturally significant as a prestige drama. The guilty pleasure framing feels outdated to them — embarrassing, even.

But even this rejection comes with its own hierarchy. Enthusiastically claiming "low" culture as legitimate is itself a form of cultural performance. It's just a different kind of taste signaling.

Just Let People Like Things (Seriously This Time)

The honest version of this conversation ends somewhere simple: the things you enjoy don't require a defense. Not to strangers on the internet, not to friends who raise an eyebrow, and definitely not to yourself.

The "guilty pleasure" framing asks you to split yourself in two — the person with good taste who knows better, and the person who watches Love Island anyway. But that split is a fiction. You're one person with a full range of preferences, and those preferences don't need to be ranked against each other.

Entertainment hierarchies will probably never fully disappear, because humans like sorting things and sorting each other. But you don't have to enforce the hierarchy on yourself. The guilt in "guilty pleasure" was always borrowed from someone else's value system.

Give it back. Press play. Enjoy the thing.