The Shame of Eating Dessert
Today’s Chicago-land Groupon (located here) is $20 dollars for $40 dollars worth of cupcakes at Swirlz, a boutique cupcake bakery. Yay! Cupcakes!
Serving cupcakes to your guests cuts down on dirty dishes and eliminates the shame of being the first one to cut into the cake. Instead of making a different cake to suit everyone’s tastes, you can get a dozen different flavors for fickle friends or firmly redefine adulthood with a cupcake-tasting party with a wine pairing for each scrumptious treat. Gone are the obnoxious protestations that a slice of cake is too big; because cupcakes fit neatly into your hand, you’ll be too consumed with the childlike delight of devouring the artful edibles to think about blown diets and foreign occupation.
Hold up. Shame of being the first one to cut into the cake? There is absolutely nothing wrong with being the first one to get dessert. In fact, in my family, we compete over the right to get dessert first every Thanksgiving (the person who gets the Thanksgiving trivia question right).
There is no shame in eating dessert!!! It really irks me when advertisers market this idea to women. “Shameful,” “sinful,” “tempting” and “guilty pleasure” are all words used when marketing chocolate, dessert, and diet desserts like 100 calorie packs of anything or dessert flavored yogurt to women. As if we are all going to ruin it all like Eve by taking one bite of dessert, assuming all women are constantly dieting.
And the constant marketing perpetrates this whole dessert as sin idea into society (Remember the Jezebel article about waiters and the “co-conspirator” approach to ordering dessert?).
I’ll have my cheesecake and eat it too. You can stop judging me now.
