Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I think the pervasive demand that people--especially female people--be productive and positive produces the majority of the guilt and shame we experience. I can't condone advice to smile more or work harder. The only general advice I can get behind is along the lines of 'travel abroad' or 'take a bath'--means to no clear end or product beyond themselves. Travel because other places have better food and different languages. Take a bath because the point of a bath is the bath. I find that enormously edifying. With Kant, I urge us to act as if our bath pleasure is not a means to an end but rather an end in itself.

"Guilty pleasure texts are like baths for the mind. They're usually cast as mindless or unproductive. My first objection here is, predictably, that therein lies a particularly bad account of productivity. Pleasure is productive; it produces itself. My second is that if you're a thinking person, you can think 'productively' through any objectan essay by Susan Sontag or a Ke$ha lyric--and if NPR ever asked for my 'This I Believe' statement, I would say, with Virginia Woolf, that I think people should consume whatever media they like without any sense of shame or pride. While I'm at it, I'd also like to ask why the guys I internet-dated in the aughts lied about having read all of the Faulkner or Joyce novels they claimed to have read on their profiles. It's a curious, and frankly puritanical, notion that what you consume defines you or--worse--ranks you, that a person is only as good or as terrible as their most-listened-to songs and the spines on their shelves."

-- Arielle Zibrak, "The Concept of the Guilty Pleasure Privileges Productivity Above All Else", excerpted from Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures (2021, New York University Press)