In the past few years, the level of Gwyneth-hate has become so intense it’s practically a religion in its own right.
Sure, the Gwyneth-lead Goop site did proffer some ridiculous health advice and esoteric ideas around wellness; but how was this any more ridiculous than the amount of Hollywood actresses putting their shiny, puffy, ageless faces down to “drinking a lot of water”?
We’re about to spot Gwyneth’s latest wellness and food book on shelf (The Clean Plate), which means an inevitable backlash of haters picking apart her statements on eating, fitness and lifestyle in general.
Gwyneth, at 46, has established herself as an actress, an author, an entrepreneur and businesswoman at the helm of a multimillion dollar empire, a digitally savvy, hands-on CEO. All the while she’s handled a very public divorce and remarriage with grace despite the sceptics, and kept two children largely out of the public eye despite being a paparazzi magnet and tabloid fodder.
Not just is she the ultimate multi-hyphenate Millennial woman, she’s won awards while doing it. She’s an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Emmy Award winning actress.
While other celebrities are happy to plaster their face on ads for perfume, makeup and hosiery, Gwyneth wasn’t satisfied with being the face of Estee Lauder and Coach. She built her own brand and whatever your feelings towards Goop, it definitely gets us talking and that is the seed of all societal change and evolution.
Goop, which began as a lifestyle newsletter arriving in inboxes weekly, now plays umbrella to pop-up shops, summits featuring major celebrities and politicians, a print magazine and a podcast.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the advocacy of vaginal steaming, crystal sex toys, coffee enemas and jade eggs as pelvic floor toners. Sure, the health claims made at the time later drew rebuke and even resulted in a lawsuit over the jade eggs (settled out of court).
But, a whole lot of women and men started talking about vaginas in workplaces, while waiting in supermarket queues and amongst one another over coffee. While dick jokes have been par for the course for decades, the V-word hasn’t been anathema to polite conversation since…ever.
Suddenly, there was talk about pelvic floor, vaginas, and more importantly, not as receptacles for male satisfaction but as elemental parts of the female body and tools for female pleasure.
Even Cosmo rarely considered women’s sexual organs as anything other than sexual pleasure zones that need to be tweaked and toned for intercourse. Imagine – using crystals and jade eggs and steaming just for our own wellbeing and exploration. Gwyneth is a game-changer.
Gwyneth has also been candid in magazine and newspaper interviews. Far from spouting PR-friendly soundbites, she has spoken her mind – sometimes at the risk of losing work or friends. Of her acting career, she admitted to The Guardian that she did some work for love (The Royal Tenenbaums, Sylvia) and some purely for money (Shallow Hal).
Women need to know this – we need to hear that women make sacrifices of their artistic integrity just to put food on the table sometimes. We need to know it’s okay not to be perfect. This applies to our food, our fitness and our beauty regimen (or lack thereof) too.
Despite advocating a macrobiotic diet, veganism and other dietary methodologies, Paltrow has also publicly admitted she drinks wine, eats meat and fries and has eased her restrictive approach to food over the years. What woman hasn’t experimented with diets and is wont to changing their mind?
But if it’s Gwyneth…well, apparently she’s not allowed to be fallible.
If you love food, then you need to respect Gwyneth as a fellow foodie if nothing else. She both hosted a TV show that explored cuisine in Spain, as well as co-writing Spain…A Culinary Road Trip with renowned chef, Mario Batali. She’s also penned numerous recipe books – and having used them, I can assure you I’d live in Gwyneth’s kitchen if I was invited.
And in case you thought Gwyneth was keeping her screen time for movies, hark back to her hilarious stints on Saturday Night Live, her guest spots on Glee, and she even popped up on an experimental online series “Web Therapy” taking the piss out of new-age hippy-ness.
Watch Gwyneth Paltrow on SNL:
What I love most of all about Gwyneth is despite all the haters, the lawsuits, the double standards, she has remained unafraid to admit to her own foibles, to take the piss out of herself, to talk publicly about postpartum depression, the breakdown of her relationships with Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and Chris Martin and ageing in the public eye.
Gwyneth was especially candid and revealing in her response to being labelled the most hated celebrity in the world by Star Magazine a few years ago. She said at the time, “Really? More than, like, Chris Brown? Me? It was also the same week that I was People‘s Most Beautiful Woman. For a minute I was like: Am I hated to the bone or am I the world’s most beautiful?”
Most of all Gwyneth makes it ok to be gloriously contradictory, to change our minds, to be curious about all the ways to live well (cupping, medicinal mushrooms, transcendental meditation have all been explored by Goop) and also to cop to being wrong or failing sometimes.
So, you don’t need to subscribe to Goop or buy her cookbooks, but next time your friends, workmates or some stranger on a train makes a joke about vaginal steaming – remember Gwyneth is making women’s bodies and women’s business palatable in this world where women need more champions.
