Azzara: Accept your guilty pleasures

You can tell a lot about us by examining our guilty pleasures, which might explain why we… You can tell a lot about us by examining our guilty pleasures, which might explain why we conceal them from one another.

Though most are harmless, guilty pleasures can be embarrassing, awkward and just plain bad for you. I’m talking about things like “For the Love of Ray J” or PerezHilton.com. These pursuits probably aren’t great for you, and you probably wouldn’t reveal them to a recent acquaintence, but no real damage is done by secretly taking pleasure in them.

But at what point do things that begin as guilty pleasures become a person’s actual interests? This can happen to the best of us. Consider the example of my relationship with Lady Gaga, pop star extraordinaire.

When she first appeared on the music scene, she was a crazy singer who wore insane costumes. Her song “Just Dance” was my guilty pleasure. I just couldn’t get enough of it, despite some embarrassment and my chasm-like separation between pop music and the words “quality art form.”

But somewhere between “Poker Face” and “Paparazzi,” a real relationship between Gaga and me grew. And when “Bad Romance” came along, it was official: She had become one of my favorite musical artists, and now there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from listening to her.

Reality television exemplifies another occurance of the pleasure-interest shift.. Shows like “The Hills,” or more recently “Jersey Shore,” always seem to start out as guilty pleasures, or maybe even as shows that one watches simply to make fun of the characters and their situations — no pun intended.

But inevitably, we begin to care about these characters, and what was once a guilty pleasure becomes hard to live without. A missed episode means not just a missed opportunity to indulge in our guilty pleasures, but also an unexpected sense of emptiness and disappointment.

Of course, some things must forever remain guilty pleasures, because openly liking “Hannah Montana” and the Jonas Brothers as a college student will never be socially acceptable. But most people will even admit to those silly little indulgences. The kinds of guilty pleasures that we really don’t want people to know about — that it would be legitimately humiliating if people were to find out about — are of a somewhat different nature.

I asked my friends, and they agreed that their guiltiest pleasure is Facebook. You might be thinking about those silly Social Interview questions, or applications like Farmville, but most of the people that I questioned admitted that the guiltiest pleasure of all is using Facebook profiles as a tool to stalk people they barely know.

We’ve all done it, and we all have our different reasons. We may be entertained by the pictures of particularly well-dressed or fun-loving people, or perhaps we’re enthralled by the status updates of our especially philosophically inclined Facebook friends, or we might simply want to see how people’s lives have changed since we last saw them.

But if these people, who fall somewhere between acquaintances and strangers, ever knew the level of our stalking abilities, things would get really weird really fast. Maybe the thrill that we get from being fully aware of how creepy we are is part of the reason we indulge in this guiltiest of pleasures.

But as long as we can admit our guilty pleasures to ourselves, there’s not any real harm done. Everyone needs some way to indulge his or her innermost desires, and if listening to Lady Gaga or clicking through 400 pictures of someone you’ve never met fulfills even a little of that desire, I say it’s a healthy thing.

It’s best to accept our guilty pleasures, even if we don’t feel entirely comfortable disclosing them to the world, because we’ve all got a little secret weirdness inside of us. Who knows what would happen if we didn’t have these harmless ways of expressing it.

E-mail Katie at kna6@pitt.edu