Guiltless Pleasures

For most Harvard students, last night was a night like any other involving late night coffee runs, treks to Lamont to study for midterms, and dashes through the cold to make it to a meeting on time. For me, however, Monday night marked the culmination of a narrative in which I have had a profoundly vested interest over the past few months. It was the season finale of ABC’s The Bachelor.

Even as I write the words, I’ve already begun to feel my cheeks flush. Being an avid Bachelor fan hasn’t exactly been a source of pride throughout my college career. I’m often tempted to conceal my interest in the show from all but my closest friends at Harvard—firstly because I’m worried people will be concerned by how deep my investment lies, but primarily because I’m ashamed of what people will think.

In fact, if I’m being honest, I’m afraid of one thought in particular: That my interest in reality television somehow undermines my intelligence. After all, the stereotype of a Harvard student is one who sips merlot and watches Mad Men, not one who curls up in front of the television with a skinny margarita to watch The Bachelor. Lately, however, I have begun to question why the two are seen as mutually exclusive. Since when has the person who enjoys NPR not been allowed to enjoy Keeping Up With The Kardashians as well?

And yet there is still the underlying assumption that watching mindless television in turn makes you mindless. I’m here to tell you that I have a mind. I may be able to recite the names of all the Real Housewives across the country, or recall what outfit Jennifer Aniston was wearing last night, or who got the final rose on The Bachelor season finale, but I can also tell you about proto-feminism in 19th century British novels, or the platforms of 2016 presidential hopefuls.

The problem is that for the past four years I’ve wittingly censored myself from revealing the full range of my interests for fear of not being taken seriously as the very thing I pride myself on being: An intellectual.

But if being an intellectual means negating the “guilty pleasures” that make me happy, or allow me to wind down when I’m stressed, then perhaps I need to rethink what it means to be a part of this community. Watching “trashy” television shows and keeping up with pop culture is very much a part of me, and it’s time I stop apologizing for them as if these lowbrow pursuits somehow make me a lowbrow scholar or a lowbrow human being.

This is not to say that my interest in things like celebrity gossip is necessarily enriching or intellectually stimulating. I fully recognize that academic endeavors are infinitely more fulfilling than the cheap pleasures I glean from, say, reading Page Six of the New York Post. I also recognize that tabloids and reality television, among other conventionally lowbrow interests, have their share of negative psychological effects. As such, I try to enjoy my guilty pleasures alongside a necessary dose of perspective that I am watching something for entertainment purposes and nothing more.

All the same, I’m no longer willing to be embarrassed by what entertains me. At the end of the day, guilty pleasures are just pleasures that have been shamed and stigmatized among the intellectual community, and even among society at large. But if you take away that stigma, if you take away that shame, all you’re left with is pleasure, and doesn’t Cicero tell us that pleasure is the chief good?

Whether or not that’s the case, it will still take me a while before I reveal my Bachelor obsession or my interest in the evolution of Kim Kardashian’s hairstyles among academic circles, and it will most certainly be a while before my resume reads “celeb gossip expert” or “reality television aficionado” at the top. Even though I may be ready to reclaim these interests, the rest of society is not. But perhaps, with time, we’ll learn to see guilty pleasures as something more than banal wastes of time and energy. Perhaps, with time, we’ll learn to rid ourselves of the guilt.

Aria N. Bendix ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is an English concentrator in Quincy House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.