Tracing the term’s history, Jennifer Szalai finds that it “exudes a false note, a mix of self-consciousness and self-congratulation”:
When “guilty pleasure” first appeared in the New York Times, in 1860, it was used to describe a brothel. The term appeared only a handful of times in the paper of record until the late nineteen-nineties, when it started coming up in its contemporary incarnation again and again, at the tail end of the culture wars. (According to the online Times archives, “guilty pleasure” shows up approximately a twelve hundred and sixty times—twelve hundred and forty-seven of those since 1996.) In some ways, the timing seems strange; the guilty pleasure was becoming a part of the cultural vocabulary right around the time cultural distinctions were ceasing to matter. But maybe it was precisely because those distinctions were becoming moot that people felt emboldened to use it. The guilty pleasure could then function as a signalling mechanism, an indicator that one takes pleasure in something but knows (the knowingness is key) that one really shouldn’t. Once distinctions were blurred, you could announce a love for pop culture that, in an earlier era, you would have been too ashamed to admit.
Her conclusion:
The guilty pleasure is a vestige of America’s disappearing middlebrow culture, of that anxious mediation between high and low, which at its best generated a desire to learn, to value cultural literacy and to accept some of the challenges it requires. General magazines once flourished because of it; even Ladies’ Home Journal, better known now as a chipper dispenser of service journalism and horoscopes, used to publish the likes of Edith Wharton and W. H. Auden. But the guilty pleasure seems to me the distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow—the condescension of the highbrow without the expenditure of effort, along with mass culture’s pleasure-seeking without the unequivocal enjoyment.
If you want to listen to Rihanna while reading the latest from Dean Koontz, just go ahead and do it. Don’t try to suggest you know better. Forget the pretense and get over yourself. You have nothing to lose but your guilt.
The Dish 