Since Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand is obsessed with vaginas, naturally her new series on Netflix, The Goop Lab, is, too. The six-part series released on January 24 featured 20 seconds of a woman exploring her vagina with a mirror (yes, we see close-ups of the vagina), a slideshow of 8 more vaginas, and almost three full minutes of a woman bringing herself to orgasm.
That was all in just one episode, the third, “The Pleasure is Ours,” in which a 90-year-old woman taught a group of women how to pleasure themselves. They all sat around naked and cross-legged and discussed their vulvas (please don’t call them vaginas, she’s very clear about that) and how women need to “own the fuck.”
The series is supposedly on health and wellness, but it's basically just the woo-woo weirdness one has come to expect from Goop. Check out the introduction:
GWYNETH: To me, it’s all laddering up to one thing, which is optimization of self. Like, we’re here one time, one life. Like, how can we really, like, milk the shit out of this?
HEALER: You have 100 needles in your face, Elise.
ELISE: Just another day at the office!
GWYNETH: The opportunity that we have with the Goop Lab is that, as a company, we can go out in different groups and go on a much deeper dive into some of these topics that our readers are curious about.
WOMAN: This is gonna be my first experience with mushrooms.
WOMAN 2: You have to let go of your ego.
GWYNETH: So what happens in a workshop?
HEALER 2: Everyone gets off!
GWYNETH: What the fuck are you doing to people? We get to explore, like is this real? Do we feel better? And grapple with some topics that are hard and embarrassing or shameful.
HEALER 2: Isn’t that beautiful?
GWYNETH: So are you ready to go out in the field and make a ruckus?
ELISE: Yeah!
GWYNETH: You guys can handle it, right?
Women exploring their vulvas was just one episode, though. What about the rest? One included the “sacrament” of doing psychedelic mushrooms as therapy and wondered whether or not that would work as a company retreat or if it would be an HR nightmare. In another, Goop employees learn health is all mind over matter so, by controlling breathing, you can jump into a freezing cold lake and feel fine and a paralyzed man talked about how this cold water technique even cured his paralysis. They tried out different diets and facials for anti-aging. Episode five explored energy fields around our body and how we can be healed without being touched Mr. Miyagi-style. Dancer Julianne Hough shared the story of having an energy healer dislodge childhood trauma which had been stored in her foot. In the final episode, we found out that we’re all a little bit psychic if we just get in touch with our intuitive side.
As with most things Paltrow, it was a lot of nonsense and a lot of vaginas (sorry, vulvas). Even the logo is basically just Paltrow herself standing in stylized lady parts (see above image). Goop is one out-there yonic brand, and Goop Lab fit right in.
