It's not good but I want it
The strange appeal of bad art, or, how I read 27 romance novels in 3 weeks
Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.
The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas
Over the past three weeks, I’ve binged 27 romance novels. This only amounts to a few hours a day, but still, all told, it’s a remarkable number of pages. In that time, I could have read any number of more worthwhile books on my shelf. I expect many of you are in similar boats this long weekend, but perhaps instead of romance novels, you’re playing ad-filled phone games or watching AI-generated shorts.
One of the strangest facets of daily life is the desire for something one has prejudged to be bad — it’s not good, but I want it.
Sometimes, these desires are classified as “guilty pleasures,” but this phrase lacks the internal judgment I want to convey. I don’t just mean gratifications we wish to hide from the world’s censure even as we esteem them; I mean enjoyments that we recognize as deficient and enjoy anyway.
In fact, I wish I could confess these books were guilty pleasures — there’s a long line of incisive writers defending such desires on the merits.
In 2013, Jennifer Szalai, now The New York Times’ nonfiction book critic, wrote a piece in The New Yorker objecting to the phrase “guilty pleasure” as an “awkward attempt to elevate as well as denigrate the object to which the phrase is typically assigned.” Szalai disdains the layered meanings of the term: “The guilt signals that you’re most comfortable in the elite precincts of high art, but you’re not so much of a snob that you can’t be at one with the people. So you confess your remorse whenever you deign to watch ‘Scandal,’ implying that the rest of your time is spent reading Proust.”
I love this piece. However, while I agree that people who speak in hushed tones of watching the straight or gay hockey TV romances are more annoying than the people who will openly stan, Szalai is missing the forest for the trees.
The guilt in such pleasures, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Experimental Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics” explains, “should be understood as guilt for violating social norms, not aesthetic ones.”
What we’re embarrassed about when we reveal our guilty pleasures is revealing to the world that our taste runs counter to the taste of those we respect. What I’m interested in is something else: a pleasure whose defect is part of the appeal.
A lot of bad art is bad because it is too legible. Within a few seconds of reading one of these novels, I know the exact arc the story will take. Even when the writing is reasonably good, it never has any patience for ambiguity or respect for surprise — no interest in withholding pleasure.
I don’t just mean that it has a happily ever after, which is a prerequisite of even good romance novels, but that every beat is easily predicted; the characters’ names, purposes, and desires blend into one another in a haze of forgetting.
This is precisely why it works. A bad romance novel occupies our attention, soothes it, pets it, feeds it straight sugar, and spends no effort challenging it.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Rewatching the same series over and over is commonplace. A 2023 YouGov poll found that 10% of Americans have watched the same season of a TV show seven or more times. Just 5% responded that they had never rewatched an episode of television (the population was U.S. adults who watch TV at all).
Good art, even pleasurable good art, demands attention. So the answer to why we want this predictable, boring art is that we sometimes want to consume that which requires none of our attention.
Sometimes, we want art to make no demands on the selves we have already failed to improve.
Top stories this week, by Milan Singh
As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.
Joey Politano made his debut in The Argument this week with an excellent piece on America’s ever-growing gambling habit. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Murphy v. NCAA, sports betting has been growing at a record clip, and the cumulative losses have been piling up. What can we do about this? You’ll have to read his piece to find out!
For over 30 years, American schoolchildren were steadily improving at math. But recently, we’ve been going backward: As of last year, practically all of that progress has been erased. Families are increasingly turning to private-sector tutoring, such as Kumon or Russian School of Mathematics — but, as Kelsey Piper notes, these options don’t scale. What we need to do is Make Public School Math Education Great Again.
Why do women earn less than men? One school of thought argues that the disparity is the result of women making different choices in the labor market. Maia Mindel argues that we can’t fully separate individual preferences from cultural norms, and that policy should push for more flexibility in employment so that both men and women have more choices in how they balance earning money with family time.
🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟
The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to narrow the 14th Amendment’s definition of birthright citizenship to exclude children born to undocumented or temporary immigrants.
Trump said the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act was “fine,” suggesting he will let it become law without his signature. Even if he vetoes the bill, there are more than enough votes in Congress to override his veto.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has successfully pushed through a law creating certain exemptions in the state’s environmental review law for new housing projects.
Worth watching...
This week on the podcast, Jerusalem and Matt discussed assimilation. Both of them think it is a good thing, but Matt believes that progressives put too much emphasis on America’s history of ethnic conflict. Jerusalem argues that the emphasis on the bad parts of America’s history invites new immigrants to see themselves as part of the tradition that pushed for positive changes, that held this country to its founding ideals.
Why the left is wrong about assimilation
I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but when I travel around the world, I don’t have to tell people I’m an American.
After the primaries in Colorado, VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini joined Lakshya Jain to discuss the emerging “Democratic Tea Party” phenomenon. Both Zachary and Lakshya have written about this, and I think their analysis is worth your time if you want to understand what’s going on here.
What’s News with The Argument
The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh
This week, I wanted to do something a little different for our cultural recommendations. In light of the semiquincentennial, I asked my colleagues to give me their favorite quotes, books, or cultural works that relate to American history.
Editor Jerusalem Demsas picked some of her favorite books set in America: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
AI and technology writing fellow Kobe Yank-Jacobs recommended “the entire introduction of the 1855 version of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which is not commonly read.” An excerpt from it:
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night.
Justin Zuckerman, our video producer, recommended Robert Altman’s Nashville, “an epic comedy-drama-musical that takes place near America’s bicentennial and follows over two dozen main characters and various interweaving storylines about American country music.”
Gender and culture writing fellow Maibritt Henkel told me that the United States “entered my imagination as a child by way of Pete Seeger. My parents would often play his Songs of Hope and Struggle CD in our kitchen, and it knocked my little socks off. Seeger made me feel like America was one big, bold group project. And that if you were willing to pitch in, then you would be welcomed with open arms. It is thanks to Seeger that I was able to reconcile American patriotism with the tireless pursuit of a more perfect union from a very early age. It is a lesson many countries, certainly my own, would do well to learn.” Here’s a recording that she sent me of Seeger performing one of his tracks in the 1960s.
Operations manager Angela Tracy also went the music route, recommending Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 rendition of the national anthem, which to her “holds the same tension I think many of us still feel between the American project as a machinery of violence and yet a relentless, unfinished labor of progress.”
As for myself, I struggled for much of the week to choose just one thing to recommend. But a conversation I had with Derek Thompson reminded me of a story I first read in the final chapter of James McPherson’s excellent 2015 history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, which I’ve reproduced an excerpt of below (albeit from a different source; emphasis mine):
When Robert E. Lee first saw a Native American wearing an officer's uniform inside the house, he wore a puzzled look as he examined the man’s dark features, then extended his hand and remarked, “I am glad to see one real American here.” In the afternoon of April 9, 1865—about 150 years ago—at the McLean House in Appomattox County, Virginia, General Lee greeted Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca who served as General Ulysses S. Grant’s military secretary since 1863. Parker replied: “We are all Americans.”
America means everything to me. I am so, so thankful to have been born in a country that defines itself not by blood and soil but by a simple yet revolutionary idea: that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. It’s the only place on Earth that I can call home.
Happy 250th, America. Here’s to the next 250.
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In “Aesthetics of Junk Fiction,” Thomas Robert’s has a nice, non-censorious term for guilty pleasures. He calls it “reading for tired minds.” Sometimes your brain just needs mild stimulation rather than a serious workout.
Before Szalai, Chuck Klosterman made a similar criticism of the term guilty pleasure, claiming it made no sense to him; if you like something, you like it, why feel guilty?
Having a mixture of high- and lowbrow tastes hasn't always been seen as contradictory. Most postwar American literature made high art out of blending the two, creating characters as fluent in and inspired by comic-book lore and sitcom tropes as they were by Proust. I'd argue even that the division between the two isn't that low- or middlebrow art doesn't challenge us (I think it does, in how it reflects certain cultural assumptions). Highbrow art is just self-consciously in the style of work we've been culturally conditioned to consider great or challenging work, and what counts as high art changes along with the culture. Shakespeare was once pop-culture, after all.
There's reward in being able to overcome and analyze work that is intentionally difficult, but there's just as much of a reward in analyzing so-called less challenging artwork and finding its meaningful place and connection to higher level cultural concerns.