What's your "guilty" pleasure?

Confession time. The first pages I read in the morning newspaper are the gossip ones. I listen to artists like Delta Goodrem and Katy Perry. Clueless is my favourite movie of all time. And since The Voice finished, I’d love to tell you that I’ve shifted my focus to catching up on episodes of 7:30 and Lateline but what I’m actually doing is catching up on the adventures of Lara Bingle and Masterchef’s Matt Preston.

Are you judging me yet? It’s okay if you are – because I am judging me. So much.

Guilty pleasures are the things we love to do but don’t talk about, like the trashy mags we hide behind the broadsheet newspapers. I heard them talked about on radio a few weeks ago and the phone lines were going mental. People were calling in to confess their guilty pleasures and it was the shows like Being Lara Bingle, The Voice,  America’s Next Top Model and even Masterchef, that were coming up again and again as the things we love to watch but don’t like to admit.

Then there were the books like Twilight or anything Marion Keys. And websites like The Daily Mail (me = obsessed) and E! Entertainment (which I’m also partial to checking. Daily. Okay, hourly.)

When I worked for a music retailer a few years back, it wasn’t uncommon for shoppers to tell me why they were buying Taylor Swift or Lionel Ritchie or the COMPLETE series of Dawson’s Creek. Those purchases were always “for my sister!” or “my Mum asked me to buy it for her” or – my personal favourite –  “I’m buying it as a joke for my friend”.

Sure you are. Just like I’m buying Enya’s Greatest Hits “as a joke for my friend”.

Recently Hello Giggles writer Michelle Konstantinovsky wrote an article about her ’embarrassing’ addiction to the cult series, 50 Shades of Grey.

She wrote:

I guarantee there is something on your Kindle/iPod/DVR/bookshelf/Netflix queue that you’re not necessarily willing to divulge at a dinner party or list on your Match.com profile, but it brings you such sheer, unadulterated recreational bliss that you’re unwilling to give it up.

That, my friend, is your guilty pleasure.

I ran into some trouble trying to find the scientific data to back this up, but I stand firm in my conviction that guilty pleasures satisfy some basic human drive for complete and utter detachment from reality. So I guess it’s ironic that some of our guiltiest pleasures feature Real Housewives, Real World housemates, and residents of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.  “Reality” is really only pleasurable when it’s not ours I guess.

And to be honest, I take issue with the term “guilty pleasure.” What is there to feel guilty about?

Isn’t there a reason Twilight is still on the best seller list? That The Voice raked in almost 2 million views a week?

Yes there is. And that reason is EVERYONE’S DOING IT.

So do you watch Real Housewives? Eat Ben and Jerry’s in bed? Do you hide your Jersey Shore DVDs behind National Geographic documentaries? Is Carly Rae Jepson’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ on your iPod?

And would you be prepared to share this information at a dinner party? Because I think if you did, the conversation would go off.

What is your ‘guilty’ pleasure? Come on, own up!

Any of these?