Susie O’Brien: Gwyneth Paltrow’s advice is load of old Goop
Gwyneth Paltrow is taking her Goop website to TV in a new Netflix series but the world needs less quackery from celebrities, not more, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
Don't miss out on the headlines from Susie O'Brien. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Gwyneth Paltrow may have the initials GP, but she’s not a doctor or a health-healer. Rather, she’s a blonde business mogul who wants women to get stung by bees on purpose, steam-clean their lady parts and spend $15,000 on a 24-carat gold dildo.
This week it was announced that Goop, Paltrow’s popular website, is about to become a Netflix series with a potential global reach of 130 million people in 190 countries.
You may be the kind of person who welcomes the privilege of paying $500 to have “a combination of infra-red and mugwort steam” blasted through your system. If so, you may be jumping for joy at the thought of Goop TV. Assuming the treatment hasn’t left you unable to move.
GOOP RELEASE INSANE CHRISTMAS GIFT GUIDE
Goop is a beguiling brand of wellness, healing and medical advice with a heavy dose of consumerism. There are $2000 pairs of jeans, $1000 Louis Vuitton headphones, unicorn skin and psychic vampire repellent. This week it’s doing a roaring trade in helping women see the benefits of $6000 double teacup gold diamond hanging earrings. “These will bring her to tears,” Goop promises. Yes, she’ll cry when she realises her hubby sold his car to buy them.
In Goop Land, you don’t buy Band-Aids, but healing stickers at $120 a pack, a $45 “naked stone”, which is really a bar of soap, and a “gold sculpting bar” that costs $200 and is used to “lift and sculpt the face”. The latter looks like a gold razor without the blade and would be about as useful.
What’s more worrying is that Goop and the Goddess Paltrow are having a significant impact on what’s considered healthy. Or, as the Goopers would say, “healthful”.
The site and upcoming show give a credible platform to wacko experts who think nasty words can change the molecular structure of water and advice from non-doctors on issues such as vaginal steaming, bee stings, earthing, cupping and the benefits of $80 vitamin supplements — Goop branded, of course.
Goop’s chief content officer promises the upcoming Netflix show will “dial up the aesthetics and quality of storytelling surrounding issues like mental, physical, and sexual health”. At least she got something right. At Goop it’s all about storytelling and aesthetics, not facts and medical science.
Banished are all the boring old medical practitioners with their peer-reviewed scientific studies and rigorous clinical trials. Yawn. So yesterday! Instead there is the Medical Medium, who says a spirit guide speaks through him to impart health information. He believes thyroid cancer is caused by a virus and can be cured by diet alone. (It doesn’t and can’t).
It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. These days, wellness experts are seen by many of their followers as bona-fide medical practitioners. These wackos wear their lack of medical training and scientific rigour as a badge of honour. They push a seductive brand of entertainment, wellness and consumerism parading as medical fact. It’s expensive nonsense disguised as female “empowerment”.
Why spend $80 on a visit to the GP when you can banish nightshades from your diet and have a moon dust smoothie for breakfast like the Oscar-winning GP instead?
Current articles on the Goop site include: Can parasites cure auto-immune diseases ? (Real doctors say no). There’s also: How to heal your aura, written by a certified herbalist, licensed acupuncturist and clairvoyant. There’s also advice on how to connect with people who have died and articles about how ADHD, bipolar disorder and post-natal depression can be managed through probiotics and high-dose vitamin supplements (which always seem to be sold on the site).
You would think people would have learnt something after Goop was fined $200,000 last year for making “unsubstantiated” marketing claims about jade eggs, which they wanted women to insert in their vaginas. They should also have learnt from the Belle Gibson saga, in which an attractive young woman falsely claimed she cured her cancer by eating a wholefood diet.
Despite a number of disclaimers, Goop’s dazzling brand of wellness is based on a regular roster of “forward-looking” doctors, provocative thinkers and paradigm shifters. Sadly, Goop puts these three categories on equal footing. Because of quackery like this, which rejects science-based medicine like vaccines, measles has re-emerged and the WHO lists vaccine hesitancy as a threat to global health. Goop told Variety the Netflix show will “address larger thematic questions the Goop audience has about leading optimal lives”.
I don’t know about you, but my optimal life involves not being fed horse s--- from a rich celebrity and her cronies.
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist
AFL locker room lechery reveals lack of respect
The sight of Richmond ruckman Mabior Chol being groped by his teammates was schoolboy locker room lechery. It was also pathetic, weird and we deserve better from our AFL players, writes Susie O’Brien.
Box office classics fail to capture iPhone generation
Movie night seems like the perfect way to get ourselves through stage four. But trying to introduce the iPhone generation to much-loved classics from the ‘80s has been a massive flop, writes Susie O’Brien.