Laila Ali likes "Flavor of Love" (Egads!), Jason Priestly (who, by all accounts, has plenty of time for guilty pleasures these days) has a "man crush" (whatever that is) on Joel McHale (whomever that is) and Denis Leary (whose own show is one of my guilty pleasures) watches "The Real Housewives of New York" with his wife.

We all have them and most of us are, if not actually ashamed we enjoy them, at least a bit secretive about them. They are the great curse of human civilization; the one preeminent reason why our civilization is not striding confidently forward but, in truth, is lurching, stumble-by-stumble, decidedly backward. They are the "guilty pleasures" of our staid, regimented, goose-stepping, stand-in-line-to-buy-what-everyone-else-is-buying lives. They are one of the ways, meager as it is, to declare - if to no one other than ourselves - that we are unique and 100% human. The fact that the activity might be detrimental to our humanity, our sanity or our coronary arteries is entirely irrelevant. They are, thus, purely hedonistic drives - dangerous, self-destructive but necessary to some - no different from riding 4-wheelers up really steep hills, bungee jumping off 400 foot bridges in Zambia, funneling at a frat party, dating girls half your age or voting for a Democrat.

Sure, guilty pleasures make no sense (if you want to get all Socrates on me) but we - all of us - have them and regularly indulge them. And the actual character of the guilty pleasure varies widely. My list would include:

• Television shows
• Magazines, trashy paperbacks
• Foods
• Expensive Fashions - shoes , purses, etc.
• Sexual
• Other activity

I accept that there are certainly other categories but, for our purposes, these will suffice. The interesting and, even, intriguing part of the puzzle is not that we engage in these activities but, instead, why we do. To me, the etiology is, undoubtedly, fascinating.

As we start, allow me to be the first to confess: I have guilty pleasures (hereafter, "GP"). I spend entirely too much time online following completely inane links to what Corey Haim thinks of Posh Spice’s kissing technique or PerezHilton.com reporting on Heather Locklear’s drug rehab. Catch me looking at this wort of twaddle and I will probably explain that I am looking for material to write about and, Lord Knows, there is plenty worthy of commentary. But, truth be told, I just find it perversely entertaining to read about the dysfunctional "lives" of the rich, famous, minutely talented and incurably stupid. I’m generally not talking about the A-List "celebrities; I prefer the washed-up and the never-weres. These are the ones (simply because they can’t afford good security people or pay off the smut reporters) who always seem to be tripping over their...well...zippers. That, sadly, is my preeminent GP. I have minor ones (like watching the Fx Networks smutty Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me) but, compared to most, I have a moderately low GP score.

In my advanced years, I try like heck to avoid the patently destructive GPs that so entice the young, dumb and full of...er...ah...vigor. I wouldn’t get on a four-wheeler and go mud riding, base jump, challenge Toby Keith to a beer drinking contest, have indiscriminate sex, play hardcore paint ball, get a tattoo, rock climbing, street race, try cocaine or ecstacy or methamphetamine, run from the police, jump in a mosh pit, ride a bull named Fu Manchu for 2.7 seconds or make a guest appearance as a celebrity stunt man on Jackass. With all due respect to Tim McGraw, I am not at all interested in "living like I am dying". Why tempt fate or speed up the inevitable? Yes, we are all going to die but, damned, why push that envelop? As a reasonable life philosophy, to me Tim’s mantra is about as logical as building a fence to keep illegal immigrants out, negotiating with Iran or North Korea, continuing to mint pennies, the equality of mankind, keeping venomous snakes as pets or betting more than a Zimbabwean dollar that Amy Winehouse will live to see thirty. Call me boring or a stick-in-the-mud or an old fogey or just a buzz-kill, but I do enjoy conscious thought, walking, working and sleeping with as little pain as possible.

Of course, GPs can be subversively self-destructive. Even though it doesn’t cause actual broken bones, hematomas or paralysis (unless of course you borrow money from a loan shark named "Blade"), buying every new Dooney & Bourke purse or 6 pairs of Jimmy Chou shoes. Since you can easily spend your monthly house and car payments on such things, what is the upside? Is it because you want to impress your friends that you are (not really) able to afford accessories that make you (not really) feel special and pretty? Do you have such a black hole in your sense of self that your really need a $700 purse to make you a worthwhile humanoid? And, if you are so in touch with the world of fashion, exactly how many times will take your D&B out or wear your Jimmy Chou’s? Five times? 25 times? How’s that return on investment going, Bunky? But, as we see, there is no logic when it comes to GPs. Why strain a neuron deciphering the undecipherable?

Another form of the insidious destructiveness of GPs are some of the really, really, really stupid stuff that some unlucky folks find entertaining. Now, Laila Ali can watch any show she wants and I am confident her morals and mores will remain entirely unaffected by the wholly trashy and degrading mirth that constitutes "Flavor of Love." She is, after all, a mature woman with a wonderful athletic heritage and, obviously, an upbringing firmly seated in moral decency and excellence. I have a very buttoned-up friend who sings hosanna and attends a Southern Baptist Church every Sunday morning and watches Ultimate Fighting, the violence that is best described as human cockfighting, every Sunday afternoon. My father, God Bless him, won’t miss any episode of the WWF comedy show. I sometimes shudder to think that this man is half my gene pool but, we all have our crosses to bear.

But others with less strength of character and, particularly, those without character whatsoever, can easily be influenced in their behavior from such corrupting, decadent, debasing and humiliating misogyny. For the most part, I am as laissez faire as the next guy, especially when it comes to freedom of speech and expression, but there comes a point when there is a diminishing return on those freedoms. I do not declare myself the arbiter of etiquette or what is sufficiently denigrating and what is not. However, I do wonder if people ever stop and think what such poisonous twaddle can do to one’s mind, even subconsciously.

After this bit of pedantic sermonizing, we can (finally) get to the "why" of the GPs. If they can be, in certain extremes, detrimental to our physical or mental health, why do we continue to indulge in them? If we drag out old Freud - and who better to throw a little confusion into a simplistic discussion than Sigmund? - the reason takes on a certain crystal clarity. As you may (or may not) recall from Herr Freud, the psychic apparatus is composed of the id, ego and super-ego. The id is our most primitive drives, species specific, for pleasure, sex, food, violence, etc. The ego is our rational brain that regulates the desires of the id to allow us to function in the real world. It is, in race car jargon, the "governor" that restrains our primitive urges so that we can function within society without a 10 page rap sheet limiting our opportunities. The pesky super-ego is the moralizing part of the psyche that watches what the ego allows the id to do and, if it steps over the line (a border unique to each of us), it "punishes" the ego with feelings of guilt and insecurity. In a comic book form, that is Freud’s breakdown.

Cinematically, the absolute best representation of the battle between the id and the super-ego was depicted in the guy-flick Animal House. In the scene, "Larry (Pinto) Kroger" (Tom Hulce) is sitting on the side of his bed at the frat house and his a passed out, underage date (who happened to be the daughter of the college dean) is half-naked and incapacitated. On each shoulder, there are good and bad "angels." The good angel (we’ll call him Super-ego) is warning Pinto to respect the nymph’s chastity; the bad angel (we’ll call him Id) is urging the young man to throw caution (and his own virginity) to the four winds. The dialogue on the screen is what I imagine goes on in our subconscious every time our id urges us to kill, ravage, destroy or otherwise debase ourselves. [The video linked to is rated "R" - it has partial nudity and profanity.] By the way, if you have not seen Animal House, you are either a chick or gay or a TeleTubbie, probably Tinkie Winkie. Whichever may be the case, if you really have not viewed it, you should. It, along with Caddy Shack and Horse Feathers, is one of truly hilarious romps ever to grace celluloid.

Superimposing this over the GPs phenomenon, we can start to see what may be at work. It is the id that is fed with GPs. In most folks, the ego allows the indulgence of the id’s desires for sex, drugs and rock and roll (a.k.a. GPs) since it perceives them as innocent and relatively harmless. After all, watching Flava Flav or Dr. Christian Troy debauch women is more acceptable to the ego than to allow the id to denigrate women in reality. The super-ego, nevertheless, views any deflowering of the feminine sex as morally and ethically taboo and will, to a varying degree, cause us to feel its wrath in the form of guilt, shame, self-doubt, anxiety and, even, feelings of inferiority. And, thus, we can see why these activities are, after all, called guilty pleasures. They please the id no end; the price we pay is a wrathful super-ego. And the poor ego just stands there and gets flogged.

The GPs is the price we must fork over to keep the id from compelling us to act on our most carnal urges. We throw it a bone, now and again, to keep its snarling teeth and blood lusts from overrunning the ego and transmogrifying us from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. In a protective sense, this is not such a bad thing. If we can suppress the (often) justifiable urge to murder our mate in their sleep or resist ramming the anal hollow who cuts us off in traffic it, ipso facto, is an evolutionary plus. We hold these truths It behooves us all, as semi-socialized members of Boobus ignorami. To keep our id on a short leash, even at the risk of turning our higher brain to soup with reality television or filing bankruptcy from the economic suicide of being a fashionista, can be argued to be a fair trade-off. After all, who can expect us to have total control over our pugnacious id? Maybe our parents but few others.

So, let the human comedy proceed. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature and you sure as hell better not walk amongst your fellow bipeds with an unfed id.