Let’s Stop the Shame: It’s Time to Ditch ‘Ironic Enjoyment’ Once and for All
I am a devotional fan of Nigella Lawson. Often when I tell people this, or when they meet me and I’m wearing my Nigella Lawson t-shirt, they assume I am being ironic. They underestimate the sort of deference a 24 year old man would have for a famous TV-chef, but I have the bookshelf — all of Nigella’s cookbooks, nestled alongside my Orwell and Ballard — to prove it. It is my love for Nigella has led to me considering why the concept of ‘ironic enjoyment’ aggravates me so much. There’s several conflicting notions at play here — is ironic enjoyment malicious at heart, deriving pleasure from something being a failure? Is it born of snobbishness, an excuse for someone to flex their intellectual muscles and enjoy the thrill of describing why something is so crap? Fittingly enough, another answer came to me whilst reading Nigella Lawson’s latest book, which has a whole chapter dedicated to the loathsome subject of the ‘guilty pleasure’. Nigella has an infamous detestation for the concept of guilty pleasures. She claims that one should never feel guilty for enjoying a Babybel as if it were fine cuisine, that something as pleasurable and necessary as food should never be mired by feelings such as guilt or remorse. But then, why does the concept of guilt come into it? For Nigella, the concept of guilty pleasure is a pre-emptive attempt at self-preservation of the ego, claiming that: “It is truly impossible to enjoy the taste of something ironically; it is just a shame induced distancing stance”. In other words, we only cling to the concept of ‘guilty pleasure’ as a way of saying: “I admit to enjoying this thing, but I also want to make it clear to you that I recognise it as ‘bad’, by the standards of whoever defines good and bad, so that you cannot mistake my guilt for ignorance.” Nigella is talking about food here, obviously, but the concept of guilty pleasure pops up elsewhere — guilty pleasure films, books, singers, etc. And for anyone who wants to appear totally aloof and intellectual, the term guilt is swapped out for the term ironic. As in, I am enjoying this film ironically. I know that it’s ‘not good’. But this is an attitude that, frankly, I am tired of. The need to appear above the enjoyment of simple pleasures is an endemic affliction that drives guilt and shame into our interactions with the world. Irony is an even more egregious excuse than guilt because irony is more insidious — the shame and ego preservation is still there, wrapped up in faux intellectualism. I’m here to argue that there is — and must be — another way.
To reject the tempting allure, the perceived safety, of the ironic is a resolutely queer stance. Queer people and queer culture have long understood that the perceived value of something is often dictated by people who themselves view the world through a very different lens, and so it is up to each of us to decide for ourselves what really resonates. For queer people, critically derided films such as Valley of the Dolls or Showgirls, with their bizarre dialogue and spotty editing, have been elevated to a state of reverence beyond the stature of any Citizen Kane or Taxi Driver. The snarky and withering put downs of shows such as The Golden Girls have entered the cultural lexicon in a way that the sonnets of Shakespeare and Strindberg can only dream. And though works of undeniable musical artistry may dominate any Top 100 list by the NME, queer celebrations are often frequented by artists who the straight world would rather forget — whether you be a Hazel Dean or Alexander Burke, you can be certain that a queer crowd will embrace you long after the TV and the radio has moved on. This is not to say that some sense of ironic judgement doesn’t creep into our experience of these cultural touchstones. As one crucial example, I found myself laughing hardest at the flagrant use of the word f*ggot in Valley of the Dolls, though that word would make me wince used elsewhere — could my enjoyment came from seeing such a loaded word used in a film that failed in its mission to be a hard hitting drama? Perhaps. But my — and I would wager to say, most people’s — enjoyment of films such as Valley of the Dolls, or songs such as The Vengabus by The Venga Boys, does not come from a place of malicious glee in watching failure. Nor is it blanketed in a thick layer of faux-derision to hide my genuine enjoyment. For queer people, enjoyment of things that are deemed ‘tacky’, ‘camp’ or — heaven forbid — ‘kitsch’, is a celebration of things deemed as crap by a stern, pretentious and utility driven cultural narrative. And of course, all of these things bring joy in some way — not in the enjoyment that comes from deep emotional investment, neither the more lofty, cerebral appreciation that comes from working with, rather than just experiencing, serious art. They bring joy in the pure sense of making you laugh, absorbing you, inspiring some reaction. This, I believe, is a good place to start when we think about consigning irony to the scrapheap.
But that is not to say that, in our effort to bid goodbye to ironic enjoyment, we need to disregard what may be deemed proper, ‘serious’ art by the cultural elite. The pursuit of pleasure comes in enjoying things that come in a variety of forms, from a variety of angles. After all, great works of art tend to persist and endure because they are crafted in such a way that could be considered masterful — presenting our world in a fascinating new way, exciting our senses, challenging our notions of morality and philosophy. But we should be careful not to elevate these so called masterworks above other forms of entertainment simply because they have been deemed more important, by some set of arbitrary guidelines that most of us living now had no hand in creating. We should be judging each thing we come across by our own personal barometer for pleasure — there’s no reason why you can’t be similarly engrossed by the works of Franz Kafka and the albums of Katy Perry. Over lockdown I have found my reading tastes seemingly mercurial, sliding from books such as Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, over to Reddit threads discussing the latest internet gossip concerning YouTube beauty gurus. One would be considered a useful, serious use of time, the other a flagrant way of wasting it. But if both bring me equal, though different, levels of joy, who’s to say why one is more ‘useful’ than another?
Speaking of ‘useful’, and of Sarah Ahmed, her latest book What’s the Use? was another moment that led me to question the veracity of ‘ironic enjoyment’. So often our perceptions of what is legitimate enjoyment, or ironic enjoyment, is entrenched in what we view as having ‘value’ or ‘use’. Ahmed drives to look at who defines what is ‘useful’ and how. Reading Ahmed’s book drove me to consider how so often, our ideas of enjoyment are driven by use — a piece of art is useful if it adds a wealth of knowledge, or reflection, to our personal lives. This, really, is a combination of snobbery and utilitarianism. Not everything has to be useful. The total sum of our lives cannot be described only as a constant mission to ‘better’ ourselves, to become smarter, more visually appealing, more efficient, more useful. Useful by whose standards? And after all, is self-preservation not a task? Finding enjoyment, fulfilment, and moment of relief? An aria taken from Samson and Delilah may have more cultural standing and technical skill than a modern romantic pop song such as, let’s say, Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis, but it’s hard to imagine more people would choose to have the former played as the first dance at their wedding. Once again, I am not suggesting that the answer lies in swapping out serious content and important moral discussions for pure, simple pleasure all of the time — as citizens of this earth, it behoves us to keep abreast of the very really traumas going on all around us. But we are also not unfaltering machines — every now and again, we need the release of a Katherine Cookson novel over a War and Peace, the salve of a microwave meal over a banquet that takes £20 to buy and as many hours to prepare, the innocent pleasure of a Steps song over a 20 minute prog rock epic. No matter who you are, and no matter your tastes, taking time to enjoy something that is profound merely through its simply enjoyability is a necessary act of preservation, not of the ego but of the soul. In the words of Aubrey Lorde: “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and an act of political warfare”.
This last quote should strike a particular chord right now, given what’s going on around us. The world we live in is in shambles — it has always been that way, but now the struggle is impossible to ignore. We should all give it our time, our attention and our energy. That is a given responsibility. But we all need to take moments to recharge. And when you do, don’t allow guilt and shame to enter your precious snatches of enjoyment. Don’t feel like every interaction with the culture around you has to be an exercise in flexing your intellect, putting on your critical hat every time you begin to have fun. In 2020 and beyond, it is imperative that we disengage ‘irony’ from our experience of pleasure. As a person who is living in a world that can be so cruel, it is an act of kindness you owe to yourself.
