Several hours ago, I settled in to read Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s New York Times Magazine profile of Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s not a standard celebrity profile, of course. It’s all about Goop (the business), wellness (the pseudo-science) and how Gwyneth has monetized her inherent elitism. I would really suggest going to the article and reading the whole thing. Carve out some time, because it’s long and well-written and Gwyneth is absolutely full of sh-t.
Strike @goop down and it will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. My story on it, its blazing success, and its founder, the Gwyneth of your discontent (diss content):https://t.co/3oCZKgNIwW
— Taffy Brodesser-Akner (@taffyakner) July 25, 2018
A few highlights:
She has no interest in making Goop products mass-market to broad audiences: “It’s crucial to me that we remain aspirational. Not in price point, because content is always free.” The things they were making — the clothing, yes, but also the creams and oils — couldn’t be made cheaply. “Our stuff is beautiful. The ingredients are beautiful. You can’t get that at a lower price point. You can’t make these things mass-market.”
Why her Goop Magazine didn’t work out with Conde Nast: “They’re a company that’s really in transition and do things in a very old-school way… But it was amazing to work with Anna. I love her. She’s a total idol of mine. We realized we could just do a better job of it ourselves in-house. I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Condé, understandably, there are a lot of rules.”
The “rules” were about fact-checking: Goop wanted Goop magazine to be like the Goop website in another way: to allow the Goop family of doctors and healers to go unchallenged in their recommendations via the kinds of Q. and A.s published, and that just didn’t pass Condé Nast standards. Those standards require traditional backup for scientific claims, like double-blind, peer-reviewed studies. G.P. didn’t understand the problem. “We’re never making statements,” she said. Meaning, they’re never asserting anything like a fact. They’re just asking unconventional sources some interesting questions. (Loehnen told me, “We’re just asking questions.”) But what is “making a statement”? Some would argue — her former partners at Condé Nast, for sure — that it is giving an unfiltered platform to quackery or witchery.
So now she’s given in to vetting all of the stupid claims Goop makes: After a few too many cultural firestorms, and with investors to think about, G.P. made some changes. Goop has hired a lawyer to vet all claims on the site. It hired an editor away from Condé Nast to run the magazine. It hired a man with a Ph.D. in nutritional science, and a director of science and research who is a former Stanford professor. And in September, Goop, sigh, is hiring a full-time fact-checker. G.P. chose to see it as “necessary growing pain.”
At the end of the day, this doesn’t read as an exposé, and yet it feels like some of Gwyneth’s smoke and mirrors have been exposed. She’s never given a sh-t about the substance of her claims, she’s never given a sh-t about women’s very real health issues, she’s never given a sh-t about anyone other than wealthy, gullible white women. Which is what I’ve been saying all along, it’s just that now she’s has a huge platform to wrap all of this up into pseudoscience/wellness and consumerism.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
You know, if she wants to market a $500 white t-shirt and some nut is foolish enough to pay that, fine.
But Goop is dispensing medical/health tips it has no business promoting, and could seriously hurt someone. I’m guessing she hired a lawyer because someone read one of the articles and was like “Girl, you are going to get SUED.”
“Girl, you are going to get SUED.”
Yep and I think someone just got a long talking too with words including “class action”, “liability”, “subpoena”, and “deposition”.
All in all GOOP is a pretty trashy operation for someone supposedly “high class”.
I agree.
It offends me it the depth of my soul that we have people who can have entire wardrobes in their multiple homes consisting of $500 tee shirts and the like and children are homeless and hungry. But the pseudo pscience is just ghastly.
One of my pass the times that I like is imaginary charity money. Can you imagine the good GOOP could do if she shared some the best ideas? Like funding visiting nurses for poor mothers. Like buying instruments and funding music departments for underserved schools. Buying a year’s worth of breakfasts for eligible kids. Like being a fairy godmother who provides money for an abortion, hotel stay, childcare, and transportation. Like paying for entertainers to regularly visit nursing homes. Just a thought, Gwyneth.
I have always disliked wealthy celebrities that do absolutely nothing worthy or philanthropic with their money. They are only privileged because they public has given them their attention and money. Yet they feel no compulsion to give back.
Exactly! And the problem especially is that this pseudo science garbage is what IS being mass marketed to people. People in my salary bracket can’t afford to buy her clothing or her makeup or her vacation tips, but we can buy into putting crystals up our bodies, and not getting proper medical care. She’s propping up fake science claims so they stick around longer than they should.
This completely. It’s one thing to push $150.000 worth of merchandise as “must haves for Spring”. It’s another to tell people that walking around with a jade egg in their vagina is healthy. My gynaecologist said that she can’t believe anyone with a medical degree would sign off on that idea and that any Doctor who would is a complete quack and a danger to women’s health.
Gwyvanka will soon be named head of the Office of Women’s Health. We’ll be forced to steam our vaginas and sit on magical crystal energy eggs for hours everyday. Tracey Anderson will be the egg inspector and those who fail to impart pure goddess energy into their eggs will be forced to do her idiotic workouts – and watch Gwyvanka do hers while asserting that she is the best and most graceful and coordinated among us.
We should all aspire to do the workouts WHILE holding the eggs in our vaginas too. And all on 400 calories a day of raw goats milk, overpriced Goop vitamins and edible flowers. Gwyneth and Ivanka certainly do share an insane level of elitism, white privilege and complete and utter removal from the reality of life as those they consider peasants, don’t they?
“We are not making statements” – this is strangely in tune with our days of Fake Newsery. So, she hired an in-house lawyer and in-house professor who will be “fact-checking” on their way to collect their paycheck from Goop. How is it different from other beauty brands paying for their own research?
I’m so glad this was covered today. I just finished the article and it was fantastic. And by fantastic, I’m mean 100% total G.P. bullsh*t. Which I am absolutely here for. She is a gossip gem.
God bless Taffy Brodesser-Akner. She’s a great writer.
Wonderful writer! No fear, no sh8t. Loved the last line of the article.
Fact-checking is “a necessary growing pain”?!! God, I hate her.
The idea that double-blind, peer-reviewed studies are now considered “old-school” makes me sick.
Yes. I couldn’t care less what this spoiled, dried-out college dropout espouses.
I enjoyed the article and it’s subtle takedown until the last line, which seemed like a cheap shot.
I agree. The last line was mean.
I wish this kind of bulls-it was being called out more. Goop’s championing of “instinct” over actual facts, and their eagerness to endorse any alternative health quack they can profit from is alarming. It’s “truthiness” as reality rather than satire and it’s this way of thinking that put a lunatic in the White House.
AGREED.
I bet Dr Jen Gunter is enjoying this.
My first thought when I saw “Goop” and “fact-checker,” @Betsy!
I couldn’t agree more with what you said. It’s
a modern day Emperor’s New Clothes. But they have no shame so being exposed doesn’t bother them. They just cover the lie with a lie, a con with a con. It’s not just reprehensible, it’s destructive.
Exactly. I feel like she’s one step away from calling her critics “fake news”.
This is also what happens when you surround yourself with people who blow smoke up your butt all day long.
I mean, wouldn’t real fact-checking just lead to a shuttering of the business? Pretty much the whole thing is a grift. This is CYA only. Plus, desperate people don’t care about evidence. They want magical tonics and potions, and they want to buy their way to a better life. And her audience can.
+1
It’s probably not real fact checking, but the kind of “fact checking” that will barely keep them from being sued. Like,”how do we word this in a way that holds up in court?”
She is insufferable.
I can’t even stand her face at this point, and I’m disgusted by everything that she stands for.
I still find it nearly incomprehensible that there are people out there who actually support and believe GP’s quackery. This article was well worth the read, and I’m glad it was able to shine an even more negative light on the long-running con job that is GOOP.
I can’t believe anyone finds Gwyneth aspirational!!! Wow.
They were begging for a lawsuit, to be blunt. It was a matter of time before the reality hit that wealth was not a substitute for actual academic study and knowledge.
“They’re a company that’s really in transition and do things in a very old-school way” – can this woman compliment anyone without throwing a shade at the same time? Geez
I don’t know, is that article going to change anyone’s mind who already believes in the goop crap? I think those of us who believe in science and do not believe in widely debunked theories already knew she is full of it. I think the writer was trying to show how even a sane person can get caught up in the magical “aspirational” thinking goop is shilling, but I’m afraid that a lot of her personal asides where she was looking down on her life (her flat feet, her smoking addiction, her non-musically inclined kids) will come off to G.P. et. al. as her just being a “hater” because she doesn’t have the looks, money, resources and discipline that G.P. does.
But I don’t think the main point of this article was to debunk Goop’s health theories. I mean, lots of people and doctors have done that already. I also don’t think the writer had any illusions about changing Gwyneth Paltrow’s views. GP decided long ago that anyone who didn’t love her was a jealous hater, and no journalist is going to change that.
I read this piece as a portrait of capitalism more than anything. It was a message to us more than to Goop and Paltrow. How we (aka “normal people”) tend to idolize the famous elite, instead of challenging the gross economic inequalities that allow people like GP to monetize on people’s vulnerabilities. How we aspire to be like them, even though there’s is nothing in our lives that resembles the massive privilege that is given to them. So we buy their products, the stuff they are shelling, to get a small piece of that lifestyle. We spend more time aspiring to be like the elite (and in effect, putting money in their pockets) than we spend protesting and being angry at the structures that create this massive divide in money and privilege.
And meanwhile, they become even richer, and the status quo persists.
That was deep and true.
I remember when she went on one of the late night talk shows and was laughing about all the controversy she caused and the crazy stuff she sells and agreed it was out there. Then when asked about what’s on the website, she had no clue. She laughed about it too, that she didn’t know. I was surprised that someone had that little knowledge about what she was peddling.
It was then that I realized she wasn’t a shrewd business person who came to work with great ideas. Just a rich white lady who uses her connections and popularity to determine what’s cool and “aspirational.”
BWAHAHAHAHAHHAHA @that header photo….
The most disturbing part of all this is the seemingly never ending neediness for females to find some sort of quick easy fix to make their lives better. Billions are spent on medically unsound diets and exercise regimes and lifestyle gurus telling us what to do. I find that sad.
I dislike that Goop aligns herself with natural healing and therapies. Evidence-based natural medicine can be great but she can lead many to throw it all in the same basket. She just adds to the stigmas.
G.P. didn’t understand the problem. “We’re never making statements,” she said. Meaning, they’re never asserting anything like a fact. They’re just asking unconventional sources some interesting questions. (Loehnen told me, “We’re just asking questions.”) But what is “making a statement”? Some would argue — her former partners at Condé Nast, for sure — that it is giving an unfiltered platform to quackery or witchery.
^^^^^^^^LOL this is like Karen Collins from “Veep”.
….We can ask so many questions…is the sky blue? is water wet? What is the definition of “vote”? What does “deadline” mean?
I hope she’s paying that fact checker a lot of money. He or she is gonna be busy.