Cultural Guilty Pleasures
So unenlightened, so barbaric, so irrational...so alluring.
One person's bad habit is another's guilty pleasure? Maybe, but then there are the "guilty pleasures" that are all guilt. So why do we cling to the idea of them?
Some bad habits are easy to abandon. We read about their negative effects--on our bodies, on our psyches, on our environment--and we're ready, if wearily, to give them up if we can. MSG? Hey, no problem, we never craved chicken chow mein that much anyway. Lard? It's outta here. Gone. Done.
Cigarettes? Disgusting avatars of a habit totally without merit. Even pot smokers can claim lowered blood pressure and improved adaptability to life's stressors--OK, yes, total obliviousness to stress, even the kind that's supposed to protect them from danger. But cigarette smokers? Even the most devout knows what a sorry habit he's clinging to.
Our tuna is dolphin-friendly. We always question from whence cometh our Chilean sea bass (neither bass nor Chilean, as it happens). We'd never suffer "blood" diamonds in our jewelry boxes.
But then there are those little cultural, well--habits is probably as good a word as any--almost always based on tradition, that we know with every neuron of our rational brains are ridiculous, pointless and cruel. And yet...we can't bring ourselves to pass them up.
Sometimes this is just a byproduct of travel. So much of our experience as engaged discoverers rather than frequent-flying dilettantes is based on giving ourselves over to some other culture's ideas and traditions, if only for the week, even when they clash with our own. We're certainly not going to mention at the churrascaria that we're vegetarians, are we? We're damned sure not going to make a fetish of our teetotaling ways in Bordeaux.
Ultimately, though, South American beef and a nice red wine are easily justifiable products in the larger scheme of things--you might prefer not to indulge, but you wouldn't fault another for it.
Not so the little "habits" listed below. Each is certifiably unnecessary to pleasurable human existence, and most are environmentally and socially irresponsible if not outright degenerate. Each pegs its advocates as retrograde and its proponents as unevolved.
And yet -- we all have our blind spots, don't we? We all have our centrifuges around which the weight of tradition and the momentum of desire keep us circling, despite our best intentions. We all have our one naughty, guilty, totally unself-actualized habit that we stubbornly, irrationally refuse to abandon -- I confess to having several. And you?
Foie gras
Guilt: Even Wolfgang Puck has finally bowed to the pressure and announced that he is banning foie gras, goose-liver pâté, from his menus. You've only to read the reports of what the geese go through to find it a sick, sad enterprise. Apparently the human agony equivalent is known as cirrhosis.
Pleasure: When done right, this is a little taste of creamy heaven. And you know what they say -- what's bad for the goose is good for the gourmand.
Fox hunts
Guilt: Granted, those who regularly indulge in this sport are not legion, but neither are they inconsiderable, at least from the fox's perspective--200,000 in the UK, by the BBC's count. They sum up the pros and cons of this elitist sport quite nicely here. It's something to do with the "quick kill."
Pleasure: Who among us, if invited to an English country house, could resist attending one of these antiquated meets? I sure couldn't. Hello, paging Merchant-Ivory.
Bull fights
Guilt: Barbaric, pure and simple.
Pleasure: Admit it, you've always wanted to spend a week either with or as Brett of The Sun Also Rises. And what's Pamplona without bull fights? It's a whole lotta not-Barcelona, that's what it is.
Mink stoles
Guilt: Hoo boy, the guilt over this shameful degree of wrong living finds its apotheosis in one self-righteous word: PETA.
Pleasure: Of course, we can counter that word with one of our own: Hedwig. From the John Cameron Mitchell movie: "Ladies and gentlemen, do you like the pelt? Be honest, because some b***h stopped me on the way in. 'What poor and unfortunate creature had to die for you to wear that?' 'My Aunt Trudy,' I replied."
So now, I really have to know: What's your most shameful guilty pleasure? Tell, tell!
