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.
I agree, but why repeat myself when I can just relink myself?