My son William is a Cleveland Browns fan. He cheers for the Browns — who play in a town that’s exactly 703 miles from our house in Athens, Georgia — because his favorite player is former Bulldog Nick Chubb, and Chubb plays for the Browns. He’s such a big fan of the (perpetually beleaguered) franchise now that he requested Santa’s big gift last year to be a trip to Cleveland for a Browns game, making him the first Southern kid in memory to want his vacation to be in the Rust Belt.

We did have a grand time, though.

After that trip, he’ll be a Browns fan for life. Which is why it was tough when the Browns — in need of an upgrade at quarterback — traded for DeShaun Watson, a terrific player who had been accused by literal dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment and was facing a substantial suspension from the NFL. They didn’t just trade for him: They gave him the biggest contract in NFL history. They didn’t care about the looming suspension, or the accusations, or any of it. They just wanted to win. They were willing to do whatever it took.

This was a hard thing to explain to my 10-year-old son, for a variety of reasons. I am trying to raise him to be not just a thoughtful person, but a kind one, and one that has a healthy respect for women (and humanity, really) that Watson so obviously lacks. Was he wrong to be cheering for the Browns? Should he feel bad wanting them to win if Watson is their quarterback? Should he root for another team?

We ultimately landed on that it was OK to root for the Browns, even if Watson is the quarterback who leads them to their ever-elusive Super Bowl. Our discussion led me to try to come up with five solid guiding principles about fandom, whether it’s sports fandom or, as they say in the world of entertainment, your “problematic faves.” How do you enjoy entertainment, even entertainment produced by less than savory humans, without losing your soul?

Here are five principles:

1. Finding a perfect avatar for fandom is impossible. The thing about Watson is that it wasn’t just the Browns who wanted to trade for him: Reportedly a third of the league tried to, and it was only that few teams because the other two-thirds already have a quarterback. The job of sports teams, and movie studios, and record labels, is not to be paragons of moral virtue. We have institutions devoted to that already. (And they’re pretty bad at it, actually.) Their job is to win, or to make movies people pay to watch, or music people want to listen to. If you limit yourself to consuming the products of someone who agrees with you on everything, well, you better be good at dunking a basketball or playing guitar, because you’re the only one who will meet those standards. If William cheered for a team other than the Browns, he’d of course have this same problem. Someone with every organization, sports or otherwise, is involved in bad things. There are no perfect houses.
2. Just because someone may be awful doesn’t mean they don’t have something to offer the world. Pablo Picasso was a genius. He was also a true louse of a person. You can have sympathy for the unfortunate souls who had to spend their lives with Picasso without, you know, actually being one of them. That Picasso was an asshole does not make his paintings any less beautiful. I’m just saying: There’s a reason everybody still listens to Michael Jackson’s music despite the man being morally indefensible in every way. People are going to react to great art (or incredible athleticism) in their own way, often in ways that are involuntary; I’ve seen Leaving Neverland, and it’s a devastating film, and it still doesn’t stop my leg from hopping up and down and a smile coming on my face the minute I start hearing “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough.” I can’t help it. It’s a great song! A lot of this comes down to personal comfort. If you are so disgusted by the crimes of Kevin Spacey that you can’t even look at him in a movie anymore — a reasonable thing to do — then his art no longer has value to you. But these visceral feelings are inherently subjective.
3. Try to make sure your support of them does not provide them extra profit. In a pinch, I try to ask myself, “does my being a part of this actively help the bad person profit in a substantial way that they wouldn’t otherwise?” This is a little subjective too, of course; technically, streaming a movie with Kevin Spacey in a small role (say, Se7en) is “helping the bad person profit.” But that seems slicing the meat a little thin. I draw the line at, say, seeing Chris Brown in concert; you might draw the line differently. But in a pinch, the rule is basically: Will anyone ever notice your decision? Will it make a difference? If you are able to handle Principle 2, and they’re not really profiting, this can hold.
4. Militant ethical consumption makes it hard to truly connect with anything. If I were to truly erase the work created in some way by terrible people — or the games won by terrible people — there would be nothing left for me to enjoy … or, at the very least, I’d be forcing myself to try to enjoy them for the wrong reasons. I think it is important for, say, comedians to be aware of their audience, not to punch down, to try to be aware of how their words can affect people — to not purposely be an asshole just to be an asshole. But you know what else is important? It’s important that they be funny. The most ethical comedian in the world is not going to have a job if they are not funny. You can try to seek out voices that are more ethical, however you might define that, but if you are only choosing your movies, sports teams, musicians, whatever, by how good of a person they are … you’re going to have a lot less fun than everybody else is. And this is, after all, entertainment. It’s supposed to be fun.
5. It’s not about them. It’s about you. My son has no connection to the Cleveland Browns. He’s not an owner, or a player, or an executive, or a shareholder. They are just a team that he cheers for. The enjoyment — and the sadness — he gets from them is entirely his, and belongs solely to him. That enjoyment is independent of the human beings who work for the team, or own it. The Browns are only how they matter to him. This makes them — to him, and to any fan of the team — less of a corporation and more of a public trust. If they win, he is happy; if they lose, he is sad. How the owner of the team feels after a win, or how a quarterback feels, is thusly irrelevant: His fandom is separate from the organization. This allows him to root for the Browns without rooting for Browns Inc. It means that whether the team is run by good people or bad people doesn’t matter; William can make sure to surround himself with good people rather than bad people in his regular life and not sweat it in people that he has no connection to and will never meet. This ends up being empowering. The team is yours. Not theirs.

I find these help. Is this rationalizing? Surely. But if you’re going to root for a team, or enjoy the films of a problematic music star, or not fight your foot from tapping during “Billie Jean,” I find them helpful. They’re not perfect. But nothing ever is.

Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.