Forgetting to Google myself often enough, I missed this article from October in Cosmopolitan where I was quoted on how people feel pressured to say the actually “hate” certain types of entertainment they usually consume. This pressure has given rise to a sort of oxymoron of a phrase called “hate watching,” or how people who watch a certain show regularly would then turn around and claim to watch just to reinforce their hatred of that show.
The term is quite foolish and the article correctly points this out. There is no such thing as “hate watching.” You enjoy watching something but you feel embarrassed to admit it when all your friends make fun of your favorite entertainment.
In my quote, I make the point that most often female-centric entertainment gets most of the disrespect and the pressure on their fans to justify themselves. Traditionally, women who enjoyed watching soap operas or reading romance novels got most of the grief. These days relationship-oriented reality shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette get piled upon as well.
Since we’re in middle of the holiday season as I write this, just between Christmas and New Year’s, it makes me think of all the people who enjoy piling on the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies. I wonder how many fans of those movies claim to be merely hate watching in order to “know how bad they really are.” What I would suggest to all those Hallmark Christmas movie fans—while Hallmark Christmas movies are not really my thing, I do enjoy watching Hallmark’s various cozy mystery series—is that they should first give all their critics the middle finger and then ask those very sophisticated and hip friends of theirs if they haven’t yet gotten sick of Batman and Spider-Man reboots. I mean, how many times can you really tell the same old story about how witnessing his parents’ deaths warped Bruce Wayne and created Batman? Or the significance of Uncle Ben’s death to Peter Parker’s psyche.
Watch whatever you like and ignore the losers who give you a hard time for it!
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