guilty pleasure

plural guilty pleasures

1. idiomaticSomething that brings pleasure but is considered taboo, unadvisable or lowbrow.

   For the renowned sushi chef, it was a guilty pleasure to eat fish sticks drowned in tartar sauce.

   3 more examples

   Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create "guilty pleasure" singles. It's supposed to be self-evident: U2's entire oeuvre deserves respectful consideration, while a spookily seductive song by an R&B singer named Tweet can only be, in the smug words of a recent VH1 special, "awesomely bad."

   2004 October 31, Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism”, in The New York Times

   We all have guilty pleasures, don't we? During the summer of 1993, my guilty pleasure was watching Saved by the Bell reruns.

   2012, Seth Vannatta, Chuck Klosterman and Philosophy: The Real and the Cereal, Open Court, →ISBN, page ix

   In postmodernism, mass culture is not so much a guilty pleasure as it is the white noise of our time.

   2013, Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 242