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Bow down to the vulva! Why Gwyneth's Goop Lab isn't all bad

From psychedelics to skipping solid food, the star’s Netflix show sounds like bunk. But – shock horror – there is wisdom here if you look hard enough

Even though her vagina smells amazing, funnily enough the sound of a Netflix show based on Gwyneth Paltrow’s $250m “health and lifestyle” empire does not appeal to me. (The show’s title, the goop lab, is styled all lowercase, though, as it turns out, bell hooks has nothing to be worried about.) For one, I am the antithesis of Goop. I balk at reading Instagram captions about peoples’ “journeys”. Especially when they are, more often than not, to the Cotswolds. Second, this is Paltrow, who once sold something called “psychic vampire repellent” on her website. So I decide to watch it, with the sole purpose of ripping it to absolute shreds.

At first, it seems an easy task. In the opening montage, Paltrow, sitting on a pastel-pink sofa that resembles labia in SheEO mode, tells us she is going to “milk the shit out of” life. Given her track record, I don’t know whether she means literally, and am concerned. The first episode documents a trip to a secluded villa in Jamaica to do a lot of, like, healing, via psychedelics and “the spirit of the mushroom”. From, like, trauma. Annoyingly, the use of mind-altering drugs in psychiatry is a field I am interested in, and psychiatry and psychology in general (I consider Freud a beach read). Even though I check the Liverpool score just as someone is allowing their soul to be entered for the first time (around their sternum, I think), I’m slowly beginning to think that Goop isn’t a total load of goop. Besides, the two mental health professionals Paltrow and Goop’s chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, speak to – not the mushroom shamans, who are one step away from shark tooth necklaces – do have interesting things to say, in particular about the benefits of microdosing.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tXPimz
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