Slaying the Pop Culture Should Monster
I like many “embarrassing” or “lame” pieces pop culture. I’ve mentioned a number of these in different pieces, but here are a few examples. I enjoyed reading Twilight. I only read the first three, but I enjoyed them very much, reread them several times, and still have Thoughts about how Book 3 should have ended. I read tons of Harry Potter fan fiction, and have several in-progress works bookmarked. I love the songs “We Built this City” by Starship and “Photograph” by Nickelback.
All of these things are considered embarrassing, or just plain bad by pop culture consensus. Twilight has been eviscerated by both the culture en masse and critics alike, and “We Built This City” is frequently mentioned on “Worst Songs Ever Made” lists. All of the things I mentioned are so disparaged by American culture they are often little more than punchlines. They are embarrassing or shameful to admit to liking. Something to apologize for, or say you only like “ironically.”
I’ve felt this pressure many times, and chosen not to mention that I like (or liked) things that have been determined by popular consensus to be worthy of contempt. And after many years, I’ve come to an important realization – I have nothing to be embarrassed about. I like what I like, and the only people that it really matters to is me, irrespective of what I’m told I should like.
Our culture has tiers of acceptability when it comes to pop culture. Interestingly, it’s not exactly a “high culture” vs “low culture” divide. If you like French new wave cinema, something that is quite arguably high culture, it could easily come off as pretentious or out of touch. Whereas nothing is more likely to generate dozens of think-pieces than the latest Taylor Swift single, the literal queen of bubble-gum pop for the past decade.
What is considered worthy of attention or appropriate to like and what isn’t by the larger cultural discourse isn’t entirely esoteric, but there is still the looming word “should.” What one “should” watch/read/like and what one “shouldn’t.” And that, the shoulds of pop culture, what I like to call the “Should Monster” is at the root of so much unnecessary negativity in pop culture commentary.
Should is an insidious and hard to ignore word, and I have a very hard time trying to stop it from influencing my pop culture habits, let alone the rest of my life. But it is also destructive. That’s why I refer to it as the Should Monster. Because it is a monster. It scares us into changing our tastes, or hiding our true feelings, lest we be on the wrong side of it.
The most important question to ask about should when it comes to pop culture is, “why?” Why should I like rap? Why shouldn’t I enjoy soap operas? And, importantly, why do other people get to tell me what to like and dislike?
Now, there are plenty of times where the “why?” has an actual answer. Such as “why shouldn’t I love 80s and 90s romcoms?” The answer is “because they create unrealistic expectations for relationships and valorize behaviors like stalking.” At which point as viewers and knowing consumers of media, we can decide if we care or not. I love Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, and I will stand by that regardless of there being many, many issues with it. But if the answer to “why?” is “because the media/cultural consensus says so,” well, that isn’t even a convincing argument to young children when their parents say it.
So many of the should/shouldn’t lines can be arbitrary. One should like Star Wars, but liking Star Trek is kind of embarrassing. Harry Potter is a masterpiece, but Eragon is trash. Whether one likes one, the other, or both (like yours truly) is a matter of taste, which is personal, not universal.
But what is worse than the arbitrary line are the ones that reinforce destructive social norms. Romance novels are the most popular fiction genre and gross the most money compared to all other kinds of genres. Yet it is still seen as lower, and called “women’s fiction” as though that is a point against it. Which is insulting to say the least. In comparison, crime/thriller novels evoke far less derision although qualitatively they aren’t better written, sell fewer novels, and make less money. The genre is just more male dominated. Situations like this, when the cultural judgement in question is based on bigotry, make the “should” in questions not just irrelevant but offensive.
The Should Monster is a mean, small-minded distortion. I’m a huge fantasy nerd and I have never watched an episode of Game of Thrones. When a person tells me I should watch it, I sometimes give an extensive, thoughtful answer, and sometimes I just shrug and say “I’m not into bro-fantasy.” Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what critics at places like NPR or the culture zeitgeist say I should or shouldn’t like. I’m always open to recommendations, but that doesn’t mean my opinions deserve to be subsumed by the broader cultural fads and expectations. The only person who I need to make happy with my pop culture choices is me. And the Should Monster can go crawl back into monster-land, where it belongs.
