These participants are all pleasant-looking, and also seemingly educated and financially comfortable-in other words, people who have the relative time and means to work on improving their erotic lives-but they still feel much more real, imperfect, and diverse than their “Goop Lab” counterparts. “Sex, Love & Goop” stars, as its subjects, several long-term couples who are experiencing some level of sexual frustration or dysfunction. Isn’t life hard enough already?Īnd yet, my initial distrust turned to begrudging appreciation, and ultimately, admiration. Tuning in to the new series, the other day, to see Paltrow, lithe and serene, as she reclines on an overstuffed sofa in her company’s beige-and-cream-and-blush Santa Monica headquarters, ready to welcome her subjects, didn’t immediately convince me that this would be a new frontier in Goop programming. It seemed that her true forte was not wellness but, rather, putting people in a state of irritated not-enoughness. (“The vagina is only the birth canal?” she asked Betty Dodson, the sex educator and masturbation guru, in amazement.) The episode was highly informative, mostly owing to Dodson, a then ninety-year-old stalwart of second-wave feminism who has since passed away, but one was left feeling more uncertain about Paltrow. There was only one sex-focussed episode in “The Goop Lab,” during which Paltrow admitted that she did not know the difference between a vagina and a vulva. Félix wrote, the Goop office where the employees already spent most of their days seemed-much like their lives-“so clean and so bright that no one would want to leave it.”) The subjects’ association with Goop made their attempts to seek out so-called optimization feel somewhat unrelatable, or even unnecessary. (The cover art depicted Paltrow standing in front of a graphic giant rendering of a vulva.) In reality, the series followed Paltrow and Goop employees as they partook in a number of experimental wellness- and spirituality-related practices-breathing exercises, psychedelic-mushroom trips, immersion in freezing waters-with the help of experts ranging from biologists to parapsychologists. (One of the products involved in the 2018 lawsuit was a “vaginal egg” that could supposedly boost a woman’s sexual energy and health.) “Sex, Love & Goop” is the company’s second collaboration with Netflix the first, “The Goop Lab,” which was released in early 2020, also positioned itself as a show at least partly about sex. Sex is a messy and complicated thing, and Goop hasn’t always demonstrated the most careful understanding of it. (In 2018, Goop was sued for making unfounded health claims about some of its products, and paid a hundred and forty-five thousand dollars in a settlement.) A single scroll through the Goop Web site-with its curated offerings of high-end Paltrow-approved sweaters, salads, and serums, alongside articles on potential life-changing regimes (soup cleanses! Chakra interpretations! Candle rituals!)-suggests that one could always be working much harder, and, likely, spending much more money, in order to become one’s best self.īut it’s one thing to sell someone a skillet or a lavender bath soak it’s another to try and fix their relationship. Paltrow has built a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar brand by tapping into women’s anxieties-growing old, gaining weight, feeling undesirable-and providing them with solutions, some of which have smacked of snake oil. on a workday), scraggly hair, churning stomach, anxious brain-offered a pretty clear answer.įor years, Goop has engaged in what feels like an optimized form of negging. Was I optimized? A quick once-over of my person-ratty pajamas (it was 1:45 P.M. In the first episode, Paltrow explains that she established her wellness company, Goop, in 2008, in order “to unearth cutting-edge ideas that could really help us optimize our lives.” These words, with their bright-eyed, Silicon Valley-esque aroma of quantifiable self-betterment, immediately made me feel both inadequate and grumpy. I’m not going to lie: as I sat down to watch “Sex, Love & Goop,” a Netflix documentary series in which the onetime Academy Award-winning actor and now entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow helps couples improve the quality of their erotic lives, I was more than a little suspicious.
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