Here at matchmine, we spend a lot of time thinking about what people like. We think about how your tastes in movies relate to the music you like. We do the same for blogs and internet video. By getting a deep, detailed understanding of your likes and dislikes across all the different media types, we’re able to find stuff you’ll love. Even the stuff you don’t want to admit to.

That brings me to the main idea of this post: the guilty pleasure. Ah yes, that which you absolutely love, though you’d never admit it to your friends. We’ve all got that song on our iPod that would make us turn bright red if our friends found out. The movie that you can’t turn off…..unless someone else is in the room. You get the picture.

In November of 2004, [my favorite author] Chuck Klosterman wrote an article deconstructing the notion of the guilty pleasure for Esquire magazine. In his article, Klosterman brings up the following points on guilty pleasures:

People who use this term are usually talking about why they like Joan of Arcadia, or the music of Nelly, or Patrick Swayze’s Road House. This troubles me for two reasons: Labeling things like Patrick Swayze movies a guilty pleasure implies that

a) people should feel bad for liking things they sincerely enjoy, and

b) if these same people were not somehow coerced into watching Road House every time it’s on TBS, they’d probably be reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

He gives a great example:

Let’s assume that I was somehow humiliated by the fact that I watched The Ashlee Simpson Show, which is something I did almost every week for two months. I think it’s a fascinating illustration of what’s wrong with young people, how the music industry operates, and how modern celebrities aspire to view themselves. But let’s pretend this wasn’t the case. Let’s say I considered this program a guilty pleasure, and let’s say my desire to watch Ashlee explain how her boyfriend ruined Valentine’s Day was something I needed to apologize for. Wouldn’t this imply that The Ashlee Simpson Show was my conscious alternative to something better? Wouldn’t this suggest that—were I not watching The Ashlee Simpson Show—I would be working on logarithms, or studying the liner notes of out-of-print jazz records, or searching for factual errors in The Economist? Because these are not things I do, and I don’t think many of the other 2.9 million people watching Ashlee Simpson every Wednesday do these things, either. We’re not losing the battle against cancer because of Ashlee Simpson. If we weren’t watching her pretend to be sexy, we’d probably just be going to the bar earlier.

It’s become clear to me that the embarrassment of having a guilty pleasure is strictly a social construct. The only reason we feel a twinge of guilt when listening to a Billy Joel song is that we’re afraid of how our friends will think of us. It’s not even that we fear they’ll make fun of us (which, in my circle of friends is granted); instead, we don’t want anyone to think we have bad taste.

Well, I’m with Chuck on this one. He says “These things that give us pleasure, they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we,” and I agree with him. We shouldn’t feel guilty of liking the things we like.

And I’ll prove it.

What are your “guilty pleasures”?