“The Shame Game: Marketing the Guilty Pleasure”

The latest issue of Bitch isn’t just the magazine’s 10th-anniversary extravaganza. It’s also the issue that contains my consideration of the phenomenon of “guilty pleasure.” In it, I take a look at chocolate, designer cosmetics, and Desperate Housewives. Here’s my thrilling conclusion:

The guilty pleasure is a troubling cultural paradigm, and one that is most often used by women and by people marketing to women. Phenomena coded as guilty pleasures suggest the possibility of transgression, but they actually reinscribe social conventions that encourage women to feel ashamed of behavior that is hardly shameful. It is, perhaps, the fake sense of empowerment offered by the guilty pleasure that is its most damaging feature. Eating chocolate cake, wearing saucy underpants, watching a nighttime soap: These are personal acts, and they suggest that the private realm is the (only) appropriate place for a woman to break the rules. When we allow ourselves to be convinced of our own disobedience, when we delight in our bad-girl selves, as we engage in truly inconsequential actions, we accept the idea that female pleasure is inherently transgressive. In fact, we are encouraged to regard wearing lipstick with a naughty name as somehow rebellious, and we are distracted from the truth that the ethos that created and reiterates the concept of guilty pleasure is anything but revolutionary.

Guilty pleasure is fleeting and, ultimately, counterproductive. A closer look at the lives of real desperate housewives—of real American women generally—might reveal that they don’t need a spa day so much as they need things like subsidized childcare, rewarding jobs—for themselves and their husbands—that don’t preclude family life, and schedules that allow for a little personal time and adult socializing. They need a society in which the pursuit of pleasure—of joyful self-expression and honest self-actualization—is nothing to feel guilty about.

To read the rest of the article, you’ll have to buy the new Bitch. This issue really is jam-packed with feminist excitement. If you subscribe now, you’ll get this issue, plus a year’s worth of smart—sometimes smart-alecky—cultural criticism while supporting an outstanding not-for-profit organization.