Owning Your Obsessions: Why the Era of Entertainment Shame Is Finally Over

Somewhere between the third season of Love Is Blind and a TikTok comment section full of PhD candidates debating reality TV villain arcs, something shifted. The old social contract — the one that said you had to preface every admission of watching The Real Housewives with "okay, it's my guilty pleasure, but..." — quietly expired. Nobody sent a memo. It just happened.

And honestly? It's about time.

The Phrase That Needs to Retire Already

Let's start with the words themselves. "Guilty pleasure" implies two things simultaneously: that you're enjoying something, and that you should feel bad about it. It's a built-in apology baked right into the language. You're essentially telling people, I know this is beneath me, but here we are.

But beneath who, exactly? That's the question a growing number of people — especially younger audiences — are starting to ask out loud. The concept of "lowbrow" entertainment has always been a class-coded, gatekeeping tool used to separate people who consumed the "right" kind of culture from everyone else. Opera good, soap operas bad. Literary fiction respectable, beach reads embarrassing. The hierarchy was never really about quality. It was about status signaling.

Gen Z, more than any generation before them, seems to have clocked this early. Growing up on the internet — where a teenager in Ohio and a film critic in New York City are equally loud in the same comment section — flattened a lot of those old hierarchies. When everyone's opinion lives in the same digital space, it gets harder to maintain the illusion that some tastes are inherently superior.

The Internet Made It Weird to Be a Snob

Here's what changed the game: communal viewing culture online. When Vanderpump Rules delivered one of the most dramatic real-life storylines in reality TV history with Scandoval, it wasn't just fans of the show talking about it. Cultural critics wrote long essays. Podcasters who'd never watched an episode suddenly had takes. The conversation became so large and so layered that dismissing it as "trash TV" started to look less like sophistication and more like willful ignorance.

The same thing happened with romance novels. For decades, the genre was treated as the punching bag of serious literary culture — dismissed as formulaic, overly emotional, written for women who didn't know any better. Then BookTok happened. Suddenly, titles like It Ends with Us and The Spanish Love Deception were selling millions of copies and generating the kind of passionate discourse that most "literary" novels could only dream of. The readers weren't ashamed. They were loud. And their enthusiasm was contagious in a way that made the old sneering feel hollow.

When millions of people are openly, joyfully obsessed with something, maintaining ironic distance from it starts to look less cool and more exhausting.

Shame Was Never Really About the Content

Here's the uncomfortable truth that cultural critics are increasingly willing to say: entertainment shame was never really about quality. It was about who was enjoying it.

Reality dating shows, romance novels, pop music with simple lyrics, celebrity gossip — these are all categories of entertainment that have historically been consumed predominantly by women and dismissed accordingly. The things that men liked in large numbers — fantasy football, action blockbusters, certain genres of video games — rarely got the "guilty pleasure" treatment. They were just... interests. Hobbies. Normal things people liked.

Pointing that out isn't a radical new take anymore. It's becoming common knowledge. And once you see the double standard, you can't really unsee it. A lot of younger people have decided, reasonably, that they're not going to perform shame about the things they love just to make people with outdated taste hierarchies more comfortable.

Unapologetic Fandom as a Cultural Identity

What's replaced the guilty pleasure model isn't just tolerance — it's active celebration. Fandoms today don't hide. They organize. They create. They analyze. A community of Bachelor fans isn't just watching the show; they're running recap podcasts, building parasocial relationships with contestants, dissecting editing choices, and writing genuinely insightful commentary about how the show handles race, class, and gender dynamics.

That's not mindless consumption. That's engagement. And the depth of it has forced even skeptics to acknowledge that "lowbrow" entertainment often generates some of the most interesting cultural conversation happening anywhere.

The same goes for fanfic communities, cosplay culture, and the people who have read every single Nora Roberts novel and can tell you exactly why her pacing works. These aren't people who don't know any better. These are people who know exactly what they like and have built rich communities around it.

What This Means for How You Consume

So practically speaking, what does ditching the guilty pleasure label actually look like?

It looks like recommending Love Island to your coworker without the disclaimer. It looks like putting your romance novel on your coffee table instead of your nightstand. It looks like telling someone your favorite movie is Mamma Mia! without immediately following it up with a more "serious" film to balance it out.

It also means extending that same energy outward. When someone tells you they're obsessed with something you'd personally never watch or read, the move is curiosity, not judgment. What do they love about it? What does it give them? Entertainment is emotional. People aren't watching The Bachelor because they think it's high art. They're watching it because it's fun, it's social, it gives them something to talk about, and it hits some emotional frequency that works for them. That's valid. Full stop.

The Vibe Has Shifted — Keep Up

The cultural permission to love what you love without apology didn't come from any single moment. It built slowly through a million comment sections, BookTok videos, fan accounts, and group chats where people realized they weren't alone in their obsessions and decided to stop pretending otherwise.

The result is a more honest entertainment culture — one where people are upfront about what actually makes them happy instead of performing taste for social approval. That's a genuinely good development. Not just for individuals, but for the industry. When people stop being ashamed of what they consume, they advocate for it. They support it financially, talk about it publicly, and push for more of it. The things that actually resonate win.

So the next time something in you reaches for that reflex apology — "it's just my guilty pleasure" — catch it. You don't owe anyone a disclaimer about your entertainment choices. Love the show. Read the book. Blast the pop song with the simple chorus that somehow wrecks you every time.

The era of performing shame is over. Enjoy the vibe.