21. Buy yourself clean
The cult of Gwynnie
Wasn’t the Gwyneth Paltrow trial fun? I feel like I’m not really supposed to like Gwyneth — everything about her, and Goop, looks like a riot of entitlement, anxiety and orthorexia — but I find her mysteriously irresistible. Obviously I’m never going to spring for a jade egg. Not that I’m immune to influencer marketing (the Fits Everybody collection from Kim Kardashian’s Skims is the platonic ideal of underwear imo), I’m just not in the Gwyneth sector, having neither the disposable income nor the emotional issues that the brand is designed to service.
Goop is for women with deep pockets and shallow self-esteem who go through life terrified that they’re doing something wrong and feel nothing but gratitude at being given a plan. People talk like $90 dollars for a month’s worth of supplements called Why Am I So Effing Tired? is a rip off, or like there’s something obscene about $80 candles, but the price tag is the point. These are products that service a deeper need than generalised fatigue or an insufficiently fragrant home. They’re products that solve the problem of what kind of woman you’re meant to be when you’ve got the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy bossed. I imagine consumers plugging in their credit card details with a deep feeling of something like relief: there goes the money, here comes my elusive sense of self.
What I love about Paltrow is that she was the one to figure this market out. Gwyneth! Proper actress Gwyneth! Miramax darling Gwyneth! The one with the Oscar! (Don’t mention the Weinstein.) It seems so deliciously unlikely to me — I would never, but never, have guessed while watched Se7en that I was watching the world’s future premier wellness shill — and so brilliantly inevitable. She figured it out because she is that woman. She worked out the answer to herself, and turned it into a business empire. The only problem is that Goop makes her even richer, and so I suppose gives her even more ennui to solve. Bad luck Gwynnie after all. (Still, she deserved to win her case. “Unable to enjoy wine tastings” my foot.)
Gimme, gimme more…
“Harry Styles hasn’t reinvented masculinity but maybe he’s rediscovered the trick that separates a great lover from a playboy: he actually seems to like women, as well as wanting to sleep with them.” I wrote about how Harry Styles is the ultimate modern playboy, meaning I spent a lot of last week listening to “Watermelon Sugar” for research.
Illustration by Tony Bell for the Sunday Times “The more time we spend online, the more we are living life on a low bit rate. Like MP3s. We’re missing the information that makes us whole, but it’s not always easy to tell just how much has been removed.” Gia is writing some extraordinary stuff about the inhumanity of online life at the moment, and I loved this piece.
Fragile woman lives a life of compulsive self-aggrandising lies, gets into online conspiracies and trolling (in this case, of Madeleine McCann’s family), kills herself when her anonymous online activities become a public shame. Fascinating interview with the bereaved son. If you’ve ever been online, you’ll recognise some of this (and if you’re really honest, you might recognise some of it in yourself).
“Doctors call it the ‘precipitant’, or trigger: the moment that sets off the anorexia. Mine was being told I looked ‘normal’.” Extract from Hadley Freeman’s memoir-slash-study of anorexia. Startlingly honest and acute.
“When it feels like I’ve lost everything, running reminds me that I still have my body and all the stories and sensations it holds.” I’m fascinated by the question of what we expect from our bodies, what our bodies are capable of, and how we reconcile (or fail to reconcile) the two, and so I loved Rachel Hewitt’s book In Her Nature.
