The tenth circle of hell
Because sometimes, all you need is a Korean dating show to reconcile with things.
Perhaps the first piece of serious literature that I’ve encountered in my life was Dante’s Inferno. After years embossed in the playful font styles of Geronimo Stilton, pasty white stories of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl, sprinkled with easily digestible Archie comics, I felt like I was in the big leagues when the Divine Comedy was first introduced to us in junior high.
To say the least, it was an interesting time having to balance the condescension that comes with higher learning, along with the stifled, pubescent glee of teenage kids knowing about the word “lust” for the first time. Divine comedy, amirite.
Whatever the half opposite of a guilty pleasure is, I feel like that’s what Inferno precisely is. It’s something that you can enjoy without the lingering feeling of being ridiculed, mostly because it ticks off all the worldly boxes in the conventional sense: religious AF, good is good, bad is bad, fantastical story, made by a dude with a cool name. Even as an agnostic, I found myself learning a thing or two from Inferno (I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s something there!). The fact of the matter is, whatever the half opposite of a guilty pleasure is (see: biscuits, plain white tees, The Beatles), they’re banked on as the safest, most popular of bets that inherently facilitate our assimilation with the rest of the world with ease.
…buuut let’s get back to guilty pleasures per se. Guilty pleasures are fun. They’re spicy, maybe even controversial at times, and I’ve had my fair share of those. I genuinely liked the debut albums of Justin Bieber and One Direction when I was in grade school. I watched How I Met Your Mother in its entirety twice a year in high school. I abhorred anime and K-Pop, until I decided I actually love them some time in college. Through the years, I’ve had several iterations of guilty pleasures that have seemingly increased in boldness as time went.
These secret indulgences, they used to be inexplicable to me. From the surface, it feels as though I’ve had only had them as a medium that I could always cling to for comfort, when nobody’s looking, of course. In possibly inaccurate biblical terms, they’re the low-hanging apple that I could always take a bite out of to cleanse my palate. While Eve, who just wanted a freaking pome to refresh herself, was evicted from Eden just for satisfying a guilty pleasure, the rest of us in the modern world might only receive raised eyebrows when we try to satisfy ours. Stark difference, but hey, we’re still comparing apples and apples as far as the feeling of satiating oneself with guilt goes.
We already know how guilty pleasures are met, but why are they met with ridicule?
According to professor Sami Schalk of the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the New York Times, these pleasures are something that we relish, but “we know we’re either not supposed to like, or that liking it says something negative about us”. Primary to this is that these indulgences often involve “categories of our identity that we disparage and marginalize in society”. This was a sentence that hit close to home, seeing as I’ve always been particular of how I’m perceived as a person (I may not look it most of the time but that’s what angst is invisible for!).
I’m opening this dialogue on guilty pleasures because I’ve had quite a substantial epiphany about it recently that started with, well, yet another guilty pleasure I developed. If there’s anything that typifies this topic, it’s reality TV – and there was a point in time earlier this year where I couldn’t stop watching Single’s Inferno on Netflix. In a nutshell, it’s this Korean dating show where a bunch of singles are stuck on an island and they flirt their asses off to make a connection with a person they fancy in hopes of translating it to a match for a date at an upscale hotel. Rinse and repeat for ten days of high hormones until they hope to eventually pick each other in the end and leave the island as a couple. End scene, roll credits.
Is it trash TV? A lot of people would say it is. Is it scripted? Ditto. But if you willfully love the show enough to forage Reddit threads about it online (me), those criticisms are something you don’t even think about in the slightest. It’s the equivalent of crack in the entertainment world.
The thing is, I’ve found that there’s just an abundance of delightful quirks with this show that came with its circumstances. Being an obviously Korean-dominated show, singles had to jump through hoops just to get their feelings across – a direct offspring of the conservative demeanor of Asian cultures in general. That and/or the mild erroneousness of the English translations give off a unique charm from the show’s dialogue.
Another aspect that brings the guilt to this guilty pleasure is, let’s face it, just how fun insightful it is to judge people as they act on real life scenarios for your viewing experience (I realize that sounds dystopian). You could never imagine the amount of times I’ve thought along the lines of “I could do better than that guy!” while watching the show, which is hilarious coming from someone who’s incapable of holding a conversation with a stranger without feeling the need to crawl into a cave thereafter.
That thought, that train of satisfaction from watching these bits and pieces of the show, was what drove me to think of guilty pleasures such as Single’s Inferno in a new light. The introvert experience lacks a lot of the proper interactions being held in dating shows such as the aforementioned, which is the most probable reason as to why I find satisfaction in it: I got to experience a lot of these social interactions through a bunch of gorgeous, single Korean people. That brought me down this extensive rabbit hole of my past interactions, and retroactively thinking, “I could do better than that guy!”; that guy being me. What was supposed to be just a silly little series to blow off some steam turned into an unexpected episode of self-growth.
And weirdly enough, the show made me a tad bit more confident in my social skills. Inexplicable, but that’s part of the process of thinking through things as trivial as guilty pleasures. Was it only an effect of watching a warm and cozy dating show? Or do guilty pleasures actually have the tendency to uncover something new within us?
As I realized how serious of an epiphany this was shaping up to be, I traced back on the previous guilty pleasures that I’ve had and try to register their significance in my personal development. While I don’t listen to Justin Bieber and One Direction as much anymore, discovering mainstream artists like them helped me immerse into the pop culture zeitgeist. Getting into anime and K-Pop helped reinforce my appreciation of my Asian self. Watching reruns of HIMYM almost exclusively during my peak discovery years gave me a sense of security, as well as that of familiarity with my comfort zone.
Come to think of it, talking about them this openly now maybe merits a removal of the guilt from said pleasures. Albeit the word “guilt” has obvious negative connotations that come with it, that particular sentiment makes the simple act of liking things transformative and meaningful. As you continue to take comfort in guilty pleasures over time, they may have the propensity to slowly but surely coalesce and part of yourself when you start to reconcile why you felt like being guilty of liking them in the first place. They graduate into something that empowers you. Perhaps, a healthy amount of doubt and guilt can go as far as to knowing oneself even further after all.
Or so, that’s what I thought when I found myself getting all giddy over the final matches of the Single’s Inferno cast. Being shameless is the tenth circle of hell.