In this formulation, society imposes guilt and denies pleasure. To be true to yourself, to resist social control, you need to own your authentic loves. Even the essayist Mark Dery, who defended guilty pleasures in a recent Boing Boing article, retains this basic construction. Dery argues that guilt can signal real and valuable individual uncertainty. Guilt is okay if it's a sign of "intellectual honesty" and "genuine ambivalence"; it's only bad if it's a fear of other people. According to Dery, I can feel guilty about Iggy as long as my guilt is all internal. I can like some things about Iggy (those Abba-worthy hooks) while disliking other things (the authenticity-mongering), as long as likes and dislikes come from myself rather than from my fear of mockery. Pleasure, for Dery as for Stephan, shouldn't be limited by repressive killjoys.

But are those arbiters out there really all killjoys? Is culture really structured around the repression of pleasure? Iggy Azalea may not have won a Grammy, but she isn't exactly contraband either. On the contrary, she's a massively successful performer. Culture isn't hiding her from me; culture is packaging her for my consumption. Capitalism is, after all, basically a giant engine for delivering pleasure. It says want this, and then it delivers the thing it has worked so hard to make you want—or, if not that thing, then a reasonable replica of it. Adam Smith's invisible hand is a big paw of pleasure; the thing that pushes you willingly into capitalism's sacrificial maw is your own desire.

From this perspective, guilt is not the social force attempting to control your individual, rebellious jouissance. Rather, pleasure is the seamless control, and guilt is a glitch in the system; a residue of individuality increasingly beneath the nacreous layers of poptimism. Popular opinion says I should enjoy The Avengers because power is fun and blowing stuff up is awesome—but there's a twinge of guilt in that pleasure when you think through how that logic actually worked in Iraq. Popular opinion says I should enjoy 50 Shades of Grey or Keeping Up With the Kardashians because being a zillionaire is sexy—but maybe, guilt says, fetishizing wealth isn't the best of all possible foundations for a just world.

Lest high-culture fans pat themselves on the back too enthusiastically, it's important to note that guilty pleasure isn't just for the lowbrow. In A Midsummer's Nights Dream, Shakespeare uses all his considerable comedic skills to show you that working people—carpenters, weavers, tailors—are ridiculous fools, unfit for the polite company of nobles. One could even argue that Shakespeare is more dangerous than E.L. James. Christian Grey is so poorly written that it's hard to imagine anyone takes him seriously as a real vision of virtuous class hierarchy. But Nick Bottom is so delightfully an ass, who can gainsay his absurdity? The greater the art, the greater the pleasure, the more one falls under the sway of the tyrannical Oberon.