The Guilty Pleasure Complex
“What’s your guilty pleasure?” a man hollered in the audience. There was a collective female eye roll. We were at a talk between two food writers, so perhaps this question was bound to come up. My friend Joe tells me I often say quite gendered things, which I’ve come to realise is true (I blame attending an all-girls school from 3-18) so forgive me for expressing this story in such gendered terms. But, as I whispered to my friend Bre just as he uttered the question, it felt like a very male thing to ask.
It was an interesting question nonetheless, which Rebecca May Johnson, whose book we were celebrating, handled well. “Do I believe in the concept of guilty pleasure?” The women in the audience knew the answer. She went on to talk about how much she loves chips – without the societal parameters of guilt – and that was that.
The question was interesting to me because of the reaction it elicited. That so many people in the audience audibly and visibly rejected its inference, me included. Yet I so often feel guilty about my pleasure, especially in the context of food, eating and bodies. I’ve been thinking a lot about my body and consumption and self-reflection and what it means to be ‘virtuous’ when it comes to food. About how others perceive my physical form. How I am distorted through a camera lens or a mirror or more worryingly, through my own eyes.
I look up on the train and I see an advert for gluten free pasta made from 100% yellow peas. I then glance down at my sad looking plastic pot of fruit that I picked up in Waitrose because my body felt sluggish and I assumed fruit would remedy the situation. My stomach gargles audibly. I’m wearing a pair of jeans that technically fit and accentuate certain features but certainly contort my stomach and perhaps even my organs in uncomfortable ways, but I do it for the reflection in the mirror and the possibility of manipulating my natural shape so I can look more like a woman on Instagram, whose stories I check daily, for no other reasons than to torture myself with her perfect life.
I feel somewhat satisfied that I’ve been spinning and to two pilates classes in a week, even though looking in the mirror at one of them, the room candlelit, the music good and loud, I felt like bursting into tears, noticing the rolls and redness, the sweat that indicated the disproportionate amount of effort I was expending compared to the woman behind me, who was long and lean and dry and unshakeable. I’ve been trying to eat something green at every meal and I wonder why I’m doing this; it feels like some sort of virtue-signalling at playing healthy, and I still don’t understand what healthy means, apart from I’d like to think it’s something to do with being happy, but that’s not what capitalism sells us, is it?
My guilty pleasure is more guilt than pleasure. I’ve written and re-written this sentence more than ten times. The thing about guilty pleasures, whether we believe in them or not (and even if we don’t, we still do), is that they like to remain silent. We whisper them, or perhaps not at all, or we even proclaim them loudly but feel the guilt in secret, away from other people’s watchful eyes. I rarely feel guilty about eating anything at the time – the pleasure overrides the guilt. It’s only afterwards, when I pass a mirror, scroll through someone’s digitised perfection, or feel so full I want to cry that I allow guilt to seep in.
‘Balance’ is what is often sold as the antidote. Although it doesn’t really target the real problem – the systemic shame that comes with imperfection. I buy into it and sometimes it works. I work out. I eat my greens. I indulge in a burger. I work out some more. Or I don’t and I feel guilty about it.
The strange thing is, when I’m not forced to gaze at my body whilst it’s contorting and flexing and tensing and moving in a studio in West London, when I simply look at it in a mirror or with my own eyes, even the rolls and the softness seem beautiful to me. I’m not sure why it pains me to see a picture of my face, a little red, a little round, taken by someone else, when that’s not how I perceive myself. It’s as if I’m embarrassed to think that this is how someone else sees me. I take being captured too seriously. I can’t reconcile the picture I have of myself in my brain and the snapshot I see on a screen. It’s why it only bothers me some of the time; because more often than not (these days, at least) I like who I’ve become, the body I inhabit and the way that I live. It’s only when I’m confronted by an image that doesn’t feel true that I start to panic.
I’m still trying to find the balance. Of caring and not caring. I’m constantly in conversation with my body, and sometimes we speak sweet nothings to each other, and other times we’re spewing hatred. I don’t like that. But it’s becoming less frequent, and I think if I learnt to stop thinking of my body as something to be looked upon, observed, judged and perceived, and instead a vessel for pleasure (not guilt), then we’d be much better friends.
As I write this, in the house I grew up in, I watch my mum make a snack for me. She brings it over – trout in a spicy gochujang sauce. She brings me chopsticks and watches me eat. She smiles. I smile. What a pleasure.