I was sitting at a wooden two-top facing the door, working through a burger and a Diet Coke, when a couple arrived carrying the January cold in on their coats like contraband.
They sat with the careful spacing of people auditioning for each other. He ordered an Indian Pale Ale with the confidence of someone who’s ordered many IPAs. She asked about a wine, reconsidered, then mirrored his order with a laugh that worked a little too hard.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Do you have siblings?”
First dates are archaeological expeditions. You dig carefully, sifting through layers of small talk, looking for something genuine buried underneath. Somewhere between the sweating beer glasses and the laminated menus, he asked what kind of TV she watched.
She listed the respectable genres first — mystery, crime — before adding, “And reality TV. That’s my guilty pleasure.”
His face shifted. “Oh,” he said. “You’re one of those girls.”
When she asked him back, he just listed his: action, comedy, crime. No disclaimers, no hedging, no qualifiers wrapped in apology.
We’ve built entire systems around which pleasures require apology and which don’t. And that pattern tells you everything about how culture actually works.
What makes the phrase “guilty pleasure” insidious isn’t just that it marks certain culture as lesser. It’s that when someone labels their own pleasure as guilty, they’re performing critical distance, signaling, “I know better than this, I’m above this, I just happen to be consuming it.” It’s a preemptive defense against judgment that simultaneously reinforces the judgment itself.
The woman at the pub wasn’t apologizing, she was negotiating. She was saying, “I know the rules, I know this is beneath me, but I’m allowed small transgressions because I acknowledge them as transgressions.”
The trap is that this makes you more complicit, not less. The person who just likes reality TV without qualification isn’t actively reinforcing the taste hierarchy. But the person who calls it a “guilty pleasure” is maintaining and enforcing the rules. The system doesn’t need external enforcement when you’ve internalized it so thoroughly that you’ll subordinate yourself before anyone asks you to.
In my observations, this performance operates differently across gender. Men do express guilty pleasures — rom-coms, pop music, reality dating shows — but notice what those have in common: they’re feminized. The asymmetry isn’t that men never apologize for their taste. It’s that they apologize when their pleasure looks feminine. Masculinity gets protected by redefining or joking away illegitimate pleasures. Femininity gets disciplined through explicit apology.
But gender is only half the story. Taste has always been a class weapon, and it remains one of the last acceptable ways to perform superiority. What makes taste so effective as a class marker is its deniability. You can’t openly say, “I’m better than you because I have more money” without sounding monstrous. But you can say, “I’m better because I appreciate the right things,” and that sounds like discernment.
When wealthy people have eccentric taste, it’s called “quirky” or “curated.” The middle class gets “interests,” provided they’re the right ones. Craft beer, yes. Bud Light, no. Pilates, yes. Planet Fitness, no. The working class operates in a different system entirely, where their cultural preferences aren’t celebrated or scorned so much as rendered invisible in conversations about taste altogether. The sectional sofa still in its plastic wrap, preserved for company, or the artificial flowers arranged on the dining table — neither registers as a design choice.
Twentieth-century French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called this “cultural capital,” where taste is learned and passed down through class structures like money, but masquerades as personal refinement. The genius of the system is that it makes class distinction feel like personal virtue.
The shift from “trashy” to “not for me” isn’t progress, it’s just a more polite hierarchy. We mock people who watch “Love Island” but binge “Severance” and call it cultural literacy. We do the same with food: fast food vs. “wellness”; exercise:home workout videos vs. SoulCycle; vacations: cruise vs. “authentic travel.” The hierarchy remains, just rebranded with the language of personal taste instead of moral judgment.
Our attachment to “good taste” is one of the last socially acceptable ways to believe we deserve our lives. You can’t claim you deserve more because you’re smarter, but you can say you have better taste. What nobody says out loud is that those preferences were mostly handed to you by your parents, your schools, the neighborhood you grew up in. Taste feels like something you developed. Usually, it’s something you inherited.
I think about that woman at the pub, adding the qualifier before mentioning reality TV. I think about every time I’ve said “it’s so bad it’s good” instead of, simply, “it’s good.”
The uncomfortable question lies in whether abandoning taste hierarchy is actually possible without abandoning judgment altogether. Taste does organize communities, after all. The problem isn’t discernment, it’s the way discernment gets weaponized.
We can at least notice when we’re performing shame around our own pleasures, notice when we’re performing judgment about others, and ask what these performances are buying us. Stopping personal participation in taste policing won’t dismantle cultural capital. The system is tied to material power, not just how we talk about TV shows. But refusing to launder hierarchy through our own apologetics matters; it’s smaller than revolution, but it’s honest.
The system works because we keep going back to that wooden two-top and deceiving ourselves over plates of onion rings. That’s about all I know for sure.
