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. 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. Was I optimized? A quick once-over of my person—ratty pajamas (it was 1:45 P.M. on a workday), scraggly hair, churning stomach, anxious brain—offered a pretty clear answer.
For years, Goop has engaged in what feels like an optimized form of negging. 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. (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.
Sourse: newyorker.com
