Book Review/Heather Seggel

I’m Lovin’ It

In his special titled “Mr. Universe,” comedian Jim Gaffigan has an extended bit about McDonald’s. When he first mentions the restaurant chain there’s silence from the crowd, and he teases them for projecting an attitude of, “Oh! I didn’t know I was better than you.” The topic then expands to include Starbucks Frappuccinos, Us Weekly magazine, and the TV show “Glee,” comprising a cycle of pleasurable consumption followed by guilt and, finally, cancer. In some ways Gaffigan is describing the things we think of as “guilty pleasures.” But beyond the ease with which they can be scarfed down, there has long been a gendered bias against most guilty pleasures. They include romance novels and trash TV, and are scorned for their lack of seriousness. A new book takes this snobbery and gleefully demolishes it, and it’s both enlightening to read and great fun to engage with.

“Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures” (New York University Press) is a new entry in this series of compact books addressing popular culture. Arielle Zibrak authors this volume with intelligence and humor. An Associate Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming, she describes a childhood spent reading any and everything with a bottomless appetite for more. That voracity helped to partially immunize her against academia’s feedback loop, wherein men set the standard of what’s important, and what they deem important is the work of other men. She mentions that students in her classes sometimes look askance at her diverse and inclusive reading lists and ask why they’re not reading more about serious topics like war, when in fact many of the books she’s chosen are about life during wartime, but told from points of view other than the battlefield (“Little Women” being a prime example).

Three main chapters echo the plot structure of many romance novels. Titled Rough Sex, Expensive Sheets, and Saying Yes to the Dress, they look specifically at the sexual dynamics of “bodice rippers” (with heavy emphasis on the significance of bonnets), the aspirational quality of media that caters to femme tastes and how wealth can be a signifier for whiteness, and the wedding dress as women’s peak achievement under patriarchy. Zibrak is not here to judge so much as complicate how we think about desire (she calls these specific ones out as “incoherent”). In a society where denying women pleasure—and expecting them to deny it to themselves—is the norm, these so-called guilty pleasures can offer a way to tap into sensual joy and complex emotions. She writes, “(T)his book is not about taste or aesthetic shame. Rather, it is about the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine shame and guilt stimulated by supposedly “lowbrow” aesthetic tendencies.”

There is so much to like here. Zibrak is very funny, and this is a brisk, dishy read that also happens to be academically rigorous. There’s subversive glee in the discussion of Hester Prynne’s titular scarlet letter here, theorizing that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s own description of it is so rich in sensual detail it must surely be broadcasting some rebellious pride in the sin it’s designed to condemn. If Hester is guilty, she’s also happy to throw the hypocrisy of her ordeal in our faces. Perhaps today she’d be wearing the same banner as an anarchy logo tee cut off well above her navel.

Zibrak writes about researcher Brené Brown’s theory that shame freezes people while guilt can motivate them to make positive change, concluding, “I’m … skeptical of any emotional logic that holds productivity as a guiding virtue … I think the pervasive demand that people—especially female people—be productive and positive produces the majority of the guilt and shame we experience.” I review young adult fiction and cozy mysteries, full of paranormal love triangles and crimes solved over tea and scones; fun, low stakes reading. And yet. Historical cozies written today are doing complicated reckoning with the pasts in which they are set; race and class are handled with more sensitivity, and “minority” doesn’t automatically signal criminality as it so often used to. Books for teens and tweens are performing heavy lifting for readers with frank talk about gender, race, class, and sexuality. A critical appraisal demands that these things be noted, but the story still has to sweep me off my feet or there’s really nothing to discuss.

Read “Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures” and think about the media you’re reluctant to openly love and why. It might be time to bring those passions out into the light. After all, as Zibrak wisely notes, “There’s fault to be found with culture that produces wants like this but not with those who experience them.”

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2021

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