Guilty pleasures

[imomus]

The Westerner's first reaction to Japan is that it's a bloody odd place with some strange attitudes to life. But the more time you spend here, the more that impression is replaced by its opposite: it's the West that's a bloody odd place with some strange attitudes to life.

Do you want an example? Okay, let's take guilty pleasures. Now, I've never seen food, books or sex advertised in Japan as a 'guilty pleasure'. A pleasure, yes. Guilty, no. But in the UK and the US (the "USUK zone", as I prefer to call it, when I'm not calling it "Angrael") it's an extremely common meme. I'll let MSNBC (a part of the empire of the puritan USUK billionaire Gates) define the concept:

Fashion and food can be guilty pleasures

"Ah, lifestyle guilty pleasures, a true catch-all for everything and anything we're just a wee bit embarrassed by. Shopping indulgences. Favorite junk-food treats. The cheap paperbacks we hide behind our college textbooks, pretending we're just saving them for that next airplane ride. Even the most straitlaced, politically correct vegan among us gives in to temptation from time to time. Guilty pleasures put color in life, and who are we to deny ourselves?"

There we have it. A consumer society needs us to consume. But a puritan culture demands that we feel guilty about sensual indulgence. Hence the centrality of the 'guilty pleasure' in the USUK zone, which is that unhappy and conflicted beast, a puritan consumer society. What I notice in the MSNBC definition is that it presents an entirely puritan continuum between the 'straitlaced, politically correct vegan' and the guilty embarrassed self-pleasurer, revelling momentarily in a lapse into self-indulgence. They're both puritans, but the vegan is a left wing self-denying puritan, the guilty self-pleasurer a right wing self-indulging puritan. At no point is it suggested that either the principled lefty or the selfish righty might indulge their pleasures freely in the manner of the Marquis de Sade, or a poor but happy Cuban musician. No, guilt is a constant.

Let us pass for our next example to Sainsburys Taste the Difference Quadruple Chocolate Cookies (thanks to Rhodri for this one. Oh, and thanks to puritan USUK billionaire Baron Sainsbury of Turville, gentech enthusiast, New Labour donor and Under-Secretary for Science in the House of Lords). The copy on this box of Sainsbury's "cookies" (it's odd, we used to call these biscuits, but USUK is all converged and amalgamated these days) reads:

"Decadently rich chocolate cookies, bulging with milk, white and dark chocolate chunks and finished with a base of smooth milk chocolate."

Rhodri was disturbed by the phrase "bulging with milk", but I found myself much more intrigued by "decadently rich", and commented: "It's a little odd when products are actually sold to us as something 'sinful" or "decadent", isn't it? What does it say about the Western psyche that pleasure has to be corrupt, unfair, destructive? Will this get worse over time, or will it look like a silly puritan anachronism soon? Will the biscuits of the future be labelled "murderous crispy shells filled with selfishly fondant racist chocolate"?"

You'd think consumer societies would at the very least be about sensual delight. You'd think that Epicureanism would have stolen a march on Christianity as a result of capitalism's emphasis on consumption, wouldn't you? That we'd have left behind the puritan belief that indulgence and gratification of the senses is unworthy, too earthly, sinful? That there could be adult, responsible, constructive pleasures that benefit not just our society, but other societies, rather than harming us and harming others in stupid, self-hating, adolescent ways? Well, apparently not. Apparently we cannot escape the clutches of guilt and the vicious circles it brings.

Far from abandoning guilt's shackles as we abandon Christianity, we in the USUK zone are getting more and more guilty, more and more convinced of our own sin. We have invented new, secular forms of sin and added them to the religious forms which are the legacy of our Protestantism. These new forms of guilt are based on a series of separations we know are wrong. We've increased the gap between rich and poor, the gap between slim and fat, the gap between public and private. This has made us harder and yet softer, but above all more deeply guilty. Our pleasures now come, visibly, at the expense of others; the excluded, the angry, those we have attacked with wars, those whose world we are in the process of polluting, depriving not just of their natural resources, but of basic essentials like soil, water and ozone. This is the way our world increasingly works, and our psychology has adapted to it. We know we are selfish and vile, and we consume in that knowledge. We squirm and flagellate ourselves as we consume. We don the hair shirt of guilt. We make token amends by adopting the chastened lingo of political correctness, itself nothing more than a codification of new sins. Sexism, mea maxima culpa. Racism, mea maxima culpa. Weightism, mea maxima culpa and pass the chocolate, father.

Much of this 'guilty pleasure' advertising is aimed at women, for whom excess weight has become a venal new form of sin. Western feminism has sold the idea of the 'superwoman' who's able to be both feminine and masculine, to raise kids as well as kick ass in the careers market, to both be and not be a sexual object; for those who fail to live up to these titanic and contradictory ideals, "guilty pleasure" is a codeword for recidivism, for some small sugary compensation for one's almost-inevitable failure; a reversion to type, a collapse back into a simple sensuality which has been declared small, weak, feminine.

Guilty pleasures are not just things like cookies and candies, junk food, cheap exploitative pop music, cigarettes, glossy Prozac-like magazines, airport novels, luxury goods snatched duty free on the way to a cheap holiday in some poor developing nation... they're also, of course, sexual. The Enjoying Guilty Pleasures DVD is, according to the Amazon blurb, "a delightfully erotic sampler of "kinky" sex acts that are actually healthy, imaginative and fun. Renowned experts Dr. Herb Samuels and Louise Andre-Saulnier address myths about S&M, "taboo" subjects like anal eroticism, and the guilt often associated with some "forbidden" fantasies. Learn firsthand how expanding the limits of lovemaking can be a hot and wholesome way to enhance trust within a committed relationship. In explicit sexual encounters, real couples demonstrate a variety of taboo treats that add spice to their sexual lives.. Indulge your pleasures and feel guilty no more! With sex, just as with food, some cravings are simply irresistible."

I'm slightly confused by that blurb, because it seems to be suggesting that we banish guilt, while at the same time saying that taboo "adds spice to sexual lives". Do Drs. Herb and Louise intend to drop the word "kinky" from future editions of their DVD? Or do they perhaps intend to drop the inverted commas they've placed around it? Will sex get more or less "kinky", more or less "taboo", more or less "guilty" in the future? And what if, taking away the guilt, we found we'd taken away the sex too? Well, I suppose there'd always be Viagra for sex, and gentech for babies. Billionaire puritan Baron Sainsbury of Turville would get richer, even if our lives would all be poorer.

(There are no pictures in today's entry because you simply don't deserve them. But I can sell you some if you promise to look at them with a strong sense of guilt.)

Comments

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Once again, a fascinating post. Have you seen the film How to Get Ahead in Advertising? It's a great dissection of the manipulation that goes on in advertising.

With regard to the whole squid/cruelty thing, my impression is that animals are treated differently in Japan, and though it's not a simple question, it seems that there simply isn't much concern over cruelty to animals there. I would say, however, that I personally believe that the love of animals that is much talked about in the West is deeply hypocritical.

Things that I found strange with regard to Japanese attitudes to animals: Pets at 'specially reduced' prices as sale items. Dogs having their vocals cords cut so that they can't bark and annoy the neighbours in Tokyo. A delight in seeing one's food die before eating (as with the dancing squid). An inability to comprehend the concept of vegetarianism, even whilst claiming to be a vegetarian culture. The most miserable zoos I have ever seen, with poorly kept, ill-looking animals in filthy enclosures. Gasps of "They look delicious" at aquariums, and so on.

On the other hand, Western culture can be seen in the kind of things I remember as a child (I was brought up vegetarian, incidentally), where children watching nature programmes at school would boo the nasty eagle as it sank its claws into the furry rabbit, but then go to dinner and tuck into slices of beef.

Incidentally, I had a conversation with a Japanese person about whales that changed my mind on the whole subject. "Why do Westerners find whaling so abhorrent?" he asked. (I had actually had the experience of being repulsed when a Japanese friend talked about how delicious whale meat was.) I said that it was because they were endangered. He replied that they had been endangered, but now their numbers were increasing again. He didn't really see the difference between eating whale and eating beef. I don't actually know the details, but I think the Japanese whaling industry is bent on misinformation concerning exactly how endangered whales are. Putting that question aside, I could not help thinking he was right. There is essentially no difference between eating whale and eating beef. I would still refue to eat whale if I had been given the opportunity after that, because I just don't like the idea. In fact, I have since returned to the vegetarianism of my boyhood days. There is no difference between eating whale and eating beef - I could not live with my hypocrisy.

Well, this is actually a complicated issue. To illustrate, a Japanese friend, living in England, expressed horror at the idea of eating lamb.

Well, I'm not sure of how much value this input is, after all.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

How silly - I've contradicted myself inadvertently:

though it's not a simple question, it seems that there simply isn't much concern over cruelty to animals there.

I'm referring to the use of 'simple' and 'simply'.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have seen 'How to get Ahead in Advertising'. Richard E. Grant at his most demonic.

I take issue with your characterisation of animal treatment in Japan. It's said that it was in Japan that man first domesticated dogs. Pets are very expensive here, and really drooled over. One foreigner I talked to said that Japanese didn't talk to her until she got a dog. I think the life of a domestic pet in Japan must be a rather luxurious one. Animal imagery pervades the culture. I've seen much more shabby zoos in, for instance, Thailand. The aquariums I've seen in Japan are extremely well-equipped and high-tech affairs. One Japanese girl I know paid hundreds of dollars to have her cat patched up after a fall which broke nearly every bone in its body -- I'm sure many Westerners would just have had it put down.

You also see signs telling people to respect the feelings of animals quite frequently. Here are photos of two, one telling people at Osaka zoo not to make pelicans cry by speaking intemperately to them, and another here in Hakodate telling people walking by the sea not to anger the squid.

[(Anonymous)]

The sign on the right is actually asking people not to drop litter on the beach, Momusu...

That act may well anger squid, granted, but it worries me that you come across as speaking authoritatively when your understanding of the message being conveyed is so wrong...you must have real problems on Mixi (which you'd rather I didn't sign up to, apparently!)

That said, respect for today's essay. x

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Someone translated the sign to me as saying that the squid depicted would get angry if people behaved badly on the beach.

I translate Mixi with Sherlock, which gets me by. God, I'm going to have to blog about it now.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I suppose that shows the dangers of generalisation. I hadn't actually encountered the kinds of thing you point out myself, but obviously they are there.

Generalisations are usually tempting because, I suppose, we notice things that are different and try to make some kind of cultural deduction from them. I don't actually like making generalisations, but they often seem unavoiable when talking about things like the differences between two cultures.

The thing about the lamb was my very small attempt to deconstruct my own generalisations.

Actually, I remembered that I had meant to mention Bataille. Someone else here mentioned Bataille and it reminded me that I recently read The Story of the Eye (that's an example of your recommendations of books having an effect, by the way). I liked the beginning and end of the story, but found the middle a bit dull in the way that surrealism sometimes can be. But what I found particularly interesting was the material appended to the story - something called 'Coincidences', by Bataille himself, and an essay called 'The Pornographic Imagination' by Susan Sontag. Now, I believe that Sontag's essay was written quite some time ago now, but I still found its content to be very fresh and resonant. I particularly liked the fact that she focused on trying to criticise pornography as a literary form rather than seeing it as something to be for or against as a kind of social issue. I was particularly taken with this passage:

One would never guess from the confident pronouncements on the nature of literature by most American and English critics that a vivid debate on this issue has been proceeding for sevral generations. "It seems to me," Jacques Riviere wrote in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise in 1924, "that we are witnessing a very serious crisis in the concept of what literature is." One of the sevral responses to "the problem of the possibility and the limits of literature," Riviere noted, is the marked tendency for "art (if even the word can still be kept) to become a completely nonhuman activity, a supersensory function, if I may use that term, a sort of creative astronomy." I cite Riviere not because his essay, "Questionins the Concept of Literature," is particularly original or definitive or subtly argued, but simply to recall an ensemble of radical notions about literature which were almost critical commonplaces forty years ago in European literary magazines.

To this day, though, that ferment remains alien, unassimilated, and persistently misunderstood in the English and American world of letters: suspected as issuing from a collective cultural failure of nerve, frequently dismissed as outright perversity or obscurantism or creative sterility. The better English-speaking critics, however, could hardly fail to notice how much great twentieth-century literature subverts those ideas received from certain of the great nineteenth-century novelists on the nature of literature which they continue to echo in 1967. But the critics' awareness of genuinely new literature was usually tendered in a spirit much like that of the rabbis a century before the beginning of the Christian era who, humbly acknowledging the spiritual inferiority of their own age to the great prophets, nevertheless firmly closed the canon of prophetic books and declared - with more relief, one suspects, than regret - the era of prophecy ended. So as the age of what in Anglo-American criticism is still called, astonishingly enough, "experimental" or "avant-garde" writing been repeatedly declared closed.

I could go on, but I won't. Basically, I'm glad I'm not the only one who is rather annoyed - to say the least - that Anglo-American literature is still stuck in a specious nineteenth century idea of 'realism', but rather depressed that this essay seems to have been written in the sixties and nothing much has changed since then. Bring on the creative astronomy, I say. Otherwise the line of Austen, whose scion we may see in Bridget Jones, will continue to have hegemony over letters.