I’ve believed for a long time now that Goop, as a business, is merely targeting Gwyneth Paltrow as a consumer. Goop is what happens when you live inside your own ass, like Gwyneth. It’s not that Gwyneth Paltrow is consciously making the decision to target rich white women with pseudoscience. It’s that Gwyneth genuinely believes in pseudoscience, just like she genuinely believes that she’s NOT selling snake oil and expensive feelings to rich bitches. Gwyneth Paltrow started a business which targets Gwyneth Paltrow as a consumer. Gwyneth sat down with the New York Times for a long-winded interview about Goop and this piece just serves as another reminder that Gwyneth is the worst. She really believes in all of the fake corporate buzzwords. She talks absolute nonsense about feminine versus masculine business energies. And once again, she claims that the tenets of wellness – expensive feelings, whole foods, time and money – are all free. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Her start as an actress: “My first purview of management was on set, because — and I think other female actors would agree with me — part of your role is just to sort of maintain culture. We’re female. So we are kind of channeling the energy for the set and correcting imbalances. If there was ever any discord, especially between men, I felt it was my job to sort of balance the energy a little bit. Also, as in most industries, it’s predominantly male. Sometimes you would be the girl in a male cast, and could bring femininity and temper some of the male stuff.

Learning how to run a business: “When a start-up starts, it’s full of feminine energy, even if it’s an all male start-up. Right? Because it’s collaborative, it’s emotional, it’s passionate, it’s instinctual. Those are all feminine qualities. And then as it scales, you have to put some rules in place. And so that’s where the masculine comes in. And you have compliance and H.R. and all these things that are putting structure to the business, which is super important. So unlearning some of the old kind of feminine ways, trying to apply the right kind of masculinity, and seeing if it’s possible to really still lead from that feminine place, is what I think about.

What Goop is all about: “We want to always be moving culture forward with what we do in the content and in the offerings and also create conversations and forums to help eliminate shame. I think a lot of women experience a lot of shame in their lives. The more we talk about things that are sometimes uncomfortable, that are sometimes unknown, it might resonate with somebody. And then we might help them shed a little bit of that feeling.

She invented gluten-free: “When we talk about something that is incendiary, I always see in six months other people starting to write about it, and 18 months later, businesses popping up around it. It’s always confirmation to me that we’re on the right track. I mean, when I did my gluten-free cookbook in 2015, the press was super negative and there were personal attacks about what I was feeding my children and what kind of mother I am. Now the gluten-free market is huge.

How she views her acting career now: “I was masquerading as an actor.”

Whether Goop is an elitist brand: A lot of people hear, “Hey, you could eat a bit better or exercise a bit more.” But they don’t want to take responsibility for themselves. So it’s easier to be critical of an entity or a person who is suggesting that, than it is to start making small, perhaps uncomfortable shifts in their lives. The true tenets of wellness are all free. Being in nature, meditating, eating whole foods. If you told our grandparents that eating whole, natural foods was elitist, they would have thought you were crazy.

[From The NY Times]

I don’t know what pisses me off more, the fact that she still says that whole foods are FREE or that she thinks Goop, as a brand, helps eliminate shame. The latter is tied to this conversation she THINKS she’s having, which is that women aren’t believed by doctors, and that women need to talk about their medical/psychological issues more in the public sphere. That conversation is very important, but I would argue that Gwyneth and Goop are doing nothing nothing to contribute to that conversation. Instead of promoting real education on sexual and reproductive health, Goop muddies the conversation over and over again by pushing her half-baked fake science, some of which will actually hurt women. Also: she TOTALLY shames women. Fat women, overweight women, women who don’t want to be told by Gwyneth Paltrow “you can eat a bit better.”

Photos courtesy of WENN.