An essay on enjoyment, embarrassment, and learning to apologise for what we like, by Emma Sinclair.
A guilty pleasure is usually defined as something you enjoy but feel slightly embarrassed about. A food you love but “shouldn’t.” A song you sing loudly in the shower even though it sits well outside your supposed demographic. A film or TV show that doesn’t exactly signal good taste.
Think being 35, drinking Echo Falls Summer Berries* while belting out K-Pop Demon Hunters alone at 9pm on a Friday.
Traditionally, admitting a guilty pleasure carried a kind of shared mischief. It was something confessed with a grin, a raised eyebrow, an unspoken agreement that we were all enjoying things we probably were not meant to. There was pleasure in the admission itself.
Online, that tone has disappeared. Nuance does not survive comment sections. What once felt like a wink now reads as an invitation to judgement.
Increasingly, guilty pleasures are not simply enjoyed. They are defended. Not because women lack confidence in their taste, but because experience has taught them what happens when they don’t.
Why “Guilty Pleasure” No Longer Feels Playful
Scroll through social media and you will see it everywhere. Women prefacing their tastes with disclaimers. “I know it’s trash but…” “Don’t judge me, but…” I admit that I have used these phrases myself when talking about my love of Selling Sunset or Vanderpump Rules.
The pleasure itself is rarely enough. It must be justified. It must pass some informal morality test in the court of the internet.
This is where the gendered nature of guilty pleasures becomes difficult to ignore.
Why Women Apologise for the Things They Enjoy
A straight man admitting he enjoys a pop song, a reality show, or a dance-heavy club anthem is often praised. Comment sections frame it as refreshing, emotionally healthy, or a green flag. His enjoyment is treated as playful or subversive.
When the person enjoying the same thing is a woman, the tone shifts. Agreement remains, but it is joined by critique. Her enjoyment becomes something to account for, as though pleasure itself requires an explanation. Why do you like this? What does it say about you? Are you not embarrassed?
Enjoyment becomes something to interrogate.
Reality TV and the Birth of the Modern Guilty Pleasure
Reality television is the clearest example. From the very beginning, it has been positioned as culturally suspect. When Big Brother launched in the UK in 2000, critics described it in language closer to moral panic than media review. One newspaper accused its executive producer of “smearing excrement over our screens.” Another dismissed the contestants as dull, fake, and intellectually empty (Source: BBC News).
And yet, millions watched. Ten million people tuned in for the first series finale alone.
The disconnect between mass enjoyment and cultural legitimacy was baked in from the start, establishing a familiar hierarchy: millions could watch, but those who enjoyed it were still expected to feel embarrassed for doing so.
That tension never resolved. It simply hardened into the idea of reality TV as a guilty pleasure.
Twenty five years later, shows like Love Island, The Traitors, and The Kardashians remain hugely popular, particularly among women. They are also routinely dismissed as shallow, manipulative, or intellectually void, even when they dominate cultural conversation and viewing figures (Source: BBC News).
Enjoyment, in this context, requires justification.
Quick Instagram break. Follow me for these vibes:
Romantasy novels provide another clear case. Despite being one of the most commercially successful genres in publishing, romance is routinely dismissed as unserious or embarrassing. Readers are encouraged to frame their enjoyment ironically, or to justify it by highlighting feminist subtexts or social value. (I worry I did this on this very blog) Simply liking the books is rarely presented as sufficient.
That pressure does not come from nowhere. Media scholars have shown that reality television invites audiences to actively police behaviour, particularly women’s behaviour, in real time. Viewers do not simply watch, they evaluate, reward and punish is real time.
As Alicia Denby argues in her analysis of Love Island, reality dating shows frequently position women as emotionally volatile while normalising comparable behaviour in men (Source: Denby)
Who Gets Judged for Watching Reality TV
Whole franchises have been based on this principle. The Real Housewives of Everywhere are series about women for a female audience. Women are filmed commenting on other women, creating tribes, arguing for dramatic purposes (and I will watch every damn episode.)
But below the dramatic music and the haute couture interview outfits sits something more persistent: the idea that women’s emotions, conflicts, and pleasures are inherently unserious.
This creates a feedback loop. Women learn, very quickly, what kinds of reactions attract ridicule. They watch others be criticised and adjust accordingly.
Prefacing enjoyment with embarrassment starts to look less like insecurity and more like strategy.
Learning Early That Visibility Invites Criticism
The expectation that women should soften, apologise for, or intellectually justify their pleasure begins early. Data from the UK shows that girls and young women experience online judgement, impersonation, and harassment at higher rates over time, reinforcing the lesson that visibility invites correction (Source: Girlguiding UK). By the time taste becomes a public performance on social media, many have already learned to anticipate the response.
This helps explain why guilty pleasures attached to women are often framed as moral or intellectual failings, rather than simple preferences.
Why Feminine Tastes Are Treated as Trivial
Writers and scholars have pointed out that pleasures associated with femininity are far more likely to be framed as trivial, indulgent, or worthy of guilt. The term “guilty pleasure” does not land evenly. It functions as a quiet form of cultural gatekeeping, signalling which tastes are legitimate and which require explanation (Source: Bond & Grace)
When Liking Something Becomes Work
Even academic voices have argued that the phrase itself distances us from pleasure, reflecting longstanding hierarchies that devalue joy when it is associated with women or marginalised groups.
The Kardashians offer a particularly stark example. A media franchise that has survived for two decades, reshaped beauty standards, influenced fashion and commerce, and maintained enormous viewership is still framed as something to apologise for. Publicly admitting enjoyment often comes with ridicule, particularly from men, despite the show’s undeniable cultural impact. I once owned a Primark t-shirt that had the first names of the sisters on it, bought because I thought it was cool. I threw it away because I was tired of being made fun of. Not because I stopped liking the show, but because liking it openly had become work.
The question then becomes less about whether these pleasures are “good” and more about why women’s enjoyment is treated as suspect in the first place. The cliché question aimed at a girl wearing a band shirt is never curiosity. It is interrogation. “Can you even name 5 of their songs beyond the popular ones?”
Who Never Has to Apologise for Pleasure
This dynamic extends beyond entertainment.
Historically, men’s indulgences have rarely required the same public justification. In the early 2000s, magazines like Zoo and Maxim were once openly marketed to young men, filled with sexualised imagery, without the expectation that readers apologise for consuming them. Moral grovelling was not part of the transaction.
When women consume media, however, pleasure often needs an alibi.
Some cultural writing has already questioned whether guilty pleasures deserve guilt at all. What is discussed less often is how unevenly that guilt is applied, and how frequently women are expected to perform awareness, irony, or self-critique before they are allowed to enjoy anything openly (Source: NYU Greene Street Review).
The Real Cost of Calling Something a Guilty Pleasure
In this light, the guilty pleasure becomes a way of keeping women’s enjoyment in check. It teaches women to monitor their joy, explain it, soften it, and keep it proportionate.
Calling something a guilty pleasure does not simply describe enjoyment. It signals that pleasure should be contained, monitored, and explained. It encourages women to manage their joy carefully, anticipating judgement before it arrives.
There is a quiet exhaustion in this. Pleasure, once something restorative or silly or comforting, becomes another site of self-surveillance.
None of this suggests that cultural criticism is unnecessary, or that media should be consumed unthinkingly. It does suggest that the demand for justification often says more about who is enjoying something than about the thing itself.
Enjoyment should not require a defence brief.
And yet, for many women, it still does. Not because pleasure is shameful, but because unqualified joy has been made risky.
Sources and Further Reading
BBC News (2025). 25 years of Big Brother: How reality TV changed Britain.
Denby, A. (2021). “Toxicity and Femininity in Love Island: How Reality Dating Shows Perpetuate Sexist Attitudes Towards Women.” Frontiers in Sociology.
Girlguiding UK. Girls’ Attitudes Survey.
Statista. Data on online harassment and gender in the UK.
NYU Greene Street Review. “Are ‘Guilty Pleasures’ specific to women?”
Bond & Grace. “Stop calling it a Guilty Pleasure.”
Media Referenced
Big Brother UK
Love Island UK
The Traitors UK
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
Selling Sunset
Vanderpump Rules
Zoo Magazine
Maxim
- The Coffee Shop Has Entered the House
- Veiled Court Review: The Grown-Up Romantasy I’ve Been Waiting For
- Gravitido ARC Review: Genius, Stupid, and Completely Brilliant
- Death on a Dinner Cruise Review: A Cosy Mystery Worth a Weekend
- Why Is It So Hard to Find a Standalone Fantasy Book?
Leave a Reply