RE: GOOP
Since posting my love for the NYT article on Gwyneth Paltrow (BACK IN AUGUST, MY GOD THE HORROR OF HOW LONG I’VE BEEN ABSENT) I’ve been reevaluating my unabashed love for all things GOOP and seeing much more of the race / size / class politics of the wellness world.
(the insides of my brain for the past few months)
I’ve been thinking about it so much that I’ve felt almost paralyzed by it. Why do I love and listen to her so much that I in the past I’ve sought out her specialists, done my best to emulate her diets, tried my best at her workouts and follow her skincare recommendations?
I realize this may seem ridiculous, but it recently became so clear to me how she and other slim, rich, white wellness ‘gurus’ could be peddling almost anything and we’d try it in our vain attempts to become them. YIKES.
What has surprised me the most is how much I’d never really questioned how her site is such an enormous tangle of white privilege and patriarchal ideas of acceptable women’s bodies until relatively recently.
I’ve been too caught up in my own search for perfection, that I didn’t even truly realize how narrowly focused and elite it is. In our celebrity obsessed culture (myself very much included) waking up to this feels representative of the bigger cultural conversation that’s being discussed on the corners of the internet that I inhabit. The danger I realize, lies in the implicit messaging, the images chosen, the people left out.
I’ve been sorting out my thoughts and have approximately 85 drafts on them, so I was thankful to find the Still Processing podcast a few days ago while driving with my HUSBAND to New Orleans to celebrate our wedding which, side note, feels like it was an eternity ago.
To fill the time, I toggled through podcasts (SO MANY PODCASTS) until I landed on Still Processing, a delightful and thought provoking cultural commentary from two New York Times writers, Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris. In the episode linked, they invited the writer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of the infamous Goop article and they all discuss how Gwyneth became the poster child for wellness and whether GP herself really understands what she’s peddling (spoiler: they don’t think she really, truly grasps what she is actually selling).
Their discussion around rich / white wellness is exactly what I’ve wanted to hear since reading Brodesser-Akner’s article. They tap into the push-pull that surrounds GP, humanizing her, but also discussing what she stands for as someone who is seen as an ideal and literally impossible to achieve for the regular (or really any) person.
My favorite part is when they are reading Brodesser-Akner’s definition of wellness and Jenna says, “I subscribe to all of these,” because wow, I feel the same way, but I’ve been wondering how to balance the subscribe with the problematic elements of exclusion, appropriation, implicit messages on weight loss, etc. Definitely take a listen on your next commute if you’re interested.
What I’m trying to work out I’ve realized is, can we partake in this brand of wellness piecemeal? Do I want GP to acknowledge that her site and business leaves out whole swaths of people or do I just understand that her true audience is wealthy women who have the means both financially and through time to access her products?
Thinking about this makes me wonder how much we all subscribe because we hope that if we follow her recommendations, we’ll become more acceptable through the very narrow lens of mainstream (white) beauty standards.
Are we not shelling out and idolizing these women who through the gene pool and privilege tell us that their status is because of what they eat or buy?
I don’t have the answer, and I’m not sure there is one, but this is what I’ve been thinking about and I’d love to know your thoughts as well. Please feel free to comment below!
Semi related end note: We also listened to Wortham and Morris’ inaugural podcast from 2016 where they touched on Colin Kaepernick’s protests as they were initially unfolding, and wow, hearing them speculate on the possible ramifications is quite the reality check now that we’re two years out.