WORK
IT: The Making of Gwyneth Paltrow in the Age of Healthism
Cheryl Quimba
The first thing I noticed was the font. The
lettering is dark gray and medium-weight, with serifs and spacing that make it look
like it was produced on an old-fashioned typewriter. The title is lower-cased,
as if subtly undercutting whatever authority might accompany the delivery of
such wide-ranging life advice from one woman to a legion of millions. Beside
each category header is a hand-drawn sketch of an object -- pasta atop the
tines of a fork, a bicycle with a basket affixed to the handlebars, a stack of
books -- to charmingly signify the type of content to follow. The sketches look
to be faintly shaded in with colored pencils. This isn't Cosmo, or Marie Claire,
or Glamour, or Vogue. This is no glossy women's mag with Anna Wintour's perfect
bob at the helm. This is a Gwyneth Paltrow lifestyle publication. This is goop.
The font and the sketched illustrations perfectly
exemplify the particular ethos that shapes and drives the goop brand. It's a
touch quirky (but clean), a little precious (but modern), and pretty and rich
and pretentious and well-meaning, with a nod to the spiritual and
"authentic"; it's the Gwyneth personality in pixilated form. Founded
in 2008, Paltrow started goop, as stated in its mission, "to share all of
life's positives." Perusing the website, it's clear that her life has
many. There are photographs of Paltrow getting her hair and makeup done before the
Oscars, English garden parties with famous friends like Stella and Paul
McCartney, tips on where to find the best quinoa bowl in LA, winter (and spring
and summer) detox recipes, and numerous skin care, jewelry, and clothing
collections, with handpicked items personally endorsed by Paltrow. Like a
traditional women's magazine, the site is both instructive and aspirational.
One week we're shown how to cook a chicken three ways, and the next week we're
offered a deal on a $485 monogrammed duffel bag.
If goop isn't Vogue, it's closer perhaps to a
slicker, moneyed reboot of Ladies Home Journal, with its pie recipes and
crafting tips for the middle-class, middle-aged Middle American woman, but with
the glamorous gamine Gwyneth at the masthead. The site is "curated"
by Paltrow, a word that has notably become ubiquitous in recent years. With so
much content at our fingertips, now anyone can curate songs into a playlist, or
restaurant recommendations into a food blog. In a world where we're all
tastemakers, it's now imperative, one might say, to filter through the morass to
find the voices one can truly trust. Enter goop, described on its site as its
readers' "most trusted girlfriend on the web."
In the high school that is American celebrity
culture, Paltrow has been the
trusted, ever-present, enviable girlfriend. Who else would be America's
boyfriend but Brad Pitt? During their mid-1990s relationship, during which they
became engaged, they firmly held the position of the country's golden couple,
exuding a kind of crisp, blond coolness that was both edgy and wholesome. That
very public relationship (which later dissolved), along with her roles in
movies like Emma and Shakespeare in Love (for which she won
an Oscar), vaulted Paltrow to full-blown stardom. Somewhere along the way,
however, she made the noteworthy decision to scale back her acting career,
rather than capitalize on her film success like her contemporaries Kate Winslet
and Naomi Watts. Other than her recurring role in the Iron Man franchise, her acting gigs in recent years have been
sporadic or have taken on the form of cameo appearances on TV shows like Glee. Her professional focus has seemed
to shift inward; instead of transforming herself to portray various characters
on screen, she has been refining her own personage to market and sell under the
banner of the Gwyneth/goop brand.
There have been significant precedents to this kind
of self-branding venture, of course, most notably Martha Stewart and Oprah. For
decades now, Stewart has not only made a career out of instructing others on
the finer points of domesticity, but has built an empire that includes
cookbooks, a magazine, website, television series, catalogs, and merchandising.
Not even her 2004 indictment on charges of insider trading and the subsequent imprisonment
have marred her image, and she remains, at 72, as busy as ever.
Although there are aspects of Paltrow's image that
have much in common with Stewart's, especially the emphasis on cooking and
homemaking, the goop brand can really be considered a descendant of Oprah, a
true American goddess if there ever was one. Years and years from now, after
the country has crumbled and our great-great-grandchildren attempt to piece
together the shards of what had been American popular culture at the turn of
the millennium, Oprah will be remembered as one of the true cultural behemoths
of our time. Born poor in rural Mississippi, Oprah is now North America's only
African-American billionaire. At the heart of her multimedia empire, and the
thing that has attracted millions of ardent devotees to anything with her name
printed on it in its characteristic swirly script, is the notion of
transformation. Oprah's biography of transformation is her brand. Everything and everyone she incorporates into the
Oprah fold, whether it be Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz, book club or financial planning
advice, teems with transformation potential, and Oprah's adherents, mostly
women, long to transform themselves too.
The daughter of an actress and director, raised in southern
California and educated at a New York City prep school, Paltrow's biography is
about as far from Oprah's as you can get. Side by side, they would look like
perfect polar opposites, but they are in fact selling different forms of the
same product -- exemplary, modern, you-can-have-it-all womanhood, complete with
handy instruction manuals. On her site, Paltrow offers her own goop-ified sort
of transformation, but where Paltrow diverges from Oprah is in her particular
emphasis on physical health and fitness. Although celebrity physician Dr. Oz
was a frequent guest on her show, and a large part of her messaging was
dedicated to physical health (including her own very public struggles with her
weight), Oprah's diversified brand spreads the focus across a wide array of
sectors, including relationships and family, work issues, personal finance,
books and other "favorite things," and increasingly, mental, emotional,
and spiritual concerns.
In comparison, Paltrow has made health and fitness --
and the potential for transformation brought on by health and fitness -- a much
more central aspect of her brand, at times to an almost comical degree. Ridiculous
statements made by Paltrow on the subject of health and food abound, such as, "I
would rather die than let my kids eat Cup-a-Soup," and "I'd rather
smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin." Although these statements are
obviously hyperbolic (right? right?!), they point to a very sincere sensibility
evident throughout the goop site, that is, a full-throttle drive for perfect
health.
But is perfect health possible? Is it even a
worthwhile goal? Any moderate consumer of mainstream American media could
attest to the uptick in the last couple decades of newspaper and magazine
articles, books, television programs, documentaries, websites, and blogs
devoted to health, fitness, diet, and nutrition. In a time when print
publishing is in seriously dire straits, health books' sales are going strong;
the book Grain Brain: The Surprising
Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar – Your Brain’s Silent Killers, about
the dangers of gluten (a type of protein that most conventional eaters have
been blissfully unaware of until the last few years), has been on the New York Times
Bestsellers list for thirty-one weeks and counting. Juice bars pop up beside
banks in suburban shopping centers, and office coworkers embark on “team
cleanses” to build company solidarity while losing weight. The recent emergence
of biometric digital apps uses wearable technology so that the health-conscious
can monitor everything from numbers of steps walked in a day to glasses of
water consumed and calories eaten and burned. Indeed, we are living in the age
of healthism, and Paltrow is our poster child.
If Oprah's biography constitutes her brand, then
Paltrow's body is hers. It makes sense, as an actress, that her body is her
symbol, badge, and ticket to instant credibility. We have gazed at her body in
its multitude of permutations, as Pepper Potts and Margot Tenembaum, blown up
to twenty feet tall on a theater's silver screen. Equipped with the knowledge
of what her elbows look like when she's burdened down by bags, or the bridge of
her nose when coming in for a kiss, we enjoy the same kind of detached intimacy
with her body that we have with other actors with whom we've grown familiar. We
know her body, or it feels as if we
do.
It's easy, then, to see Paltrow as our "most
trusted girlfriend on the web." It's easy to read and believe in the
efficacy of her guidance on all things health and fitness because the proof is
right there before our eyes -- a fit, toned body exuding vigor to an almost
blinding degree. Photos on goop show Paltrow in workout wear, smiling widely
while stretching and straining. With the fitness instructor, Tracy Anderson,
who is also her business partner and friend, Paltrow demonstrates the workout
routines she practices as part of her regular regimen, as well as the routines
she uses to achieve her "Pepper Potts body" for the Iron Man films.
And the term "achievement"
is apt here. This is actual labor -- the 45-minute cardio, the butt and leg
routines, the arm series, all accompanied by cleanse instructions in order to
"reset and detoxify" our systems. The directive here is to WORK IT,
until a body that (at least somewhat) resembles Paltrow's is achieved. Paltrow at
least seems aware of the sheer effort required to look like she does -- she
describes the process of getting into shape for the Iron Man movies as "arduous." But with a reported net
worth of $60 million, Paltrow is handily compensated for her efforts, whereas
for the common reader of her site, toiling to achieve a better body is likely
its own reward.
Understandably, goop frames the goal of perfect health
in non-financial terms. Sound physical health and fitness is presented as a
virtue unto itself, good in its own right. In this way, Paltrow's health
philosophy is very much in line with the healthism of the current historical
moment. Presented as both the absence of disease and affliction and the
presence of vigor and vibrancy, health is not merely the means to another, more
noble goal, but an end in itself that is often equated (or conflated) with
emotional, and even spiritual, well-being. It's telling that the name of Tracy
Anderson's flagship fitness program, which Paltrow enthusiastically endorses, is
"Metamorphosis." If the objective is to fundamentally transform into
our idealized selves, then what were we before?
The simple answer: not fucking good enough. The more
complicated answer: women who feel a deeply rooted ambivalence about the
current state of our bodies, who at times wish to rebelliously defy cultural
imperatives to improve our bodies while simultaneously longing to transfigure
our bodies into the bodies that appear to be better bodies than our present
bodies. We hear, and sometimes ignore, the squeaks and squeals of our needy
bodies, and once in a while, usually when folding laundry or opening the mail, the
realization arises that we're going to someday die. Or maybe that's just me.
That ambivalence is at the root of the simple act of
flipping through a women's magazine, or scrolling through a site like goop. It's
the kind of act that can be done in a spirit that is both, and at once, ironic
and earnest. You can get your kicks ridiculing a woman who writes so
passionately about colon cleanses, while also taking real note of how to make
flower arrangements in small jars for a semi-formal dinner.
Although she is mocked across all reaches of
internet-land, I don't hate Gwyneth Paltrow, despite her butt-toning
exhortations. She's like a nosy and over-sharing third cousin, or the kind of
coworker you see in the kitchen when heating up your lunch. She feels very
strongly about a few select topics, and truly means well, urgently imparting advice
to anyone in the vicinity that will largely go unheeded. And she's not alone.
Fellow celebrities Jenny McCarthy, Jessica Alba, Alicia Silverstone, and Mayim
Bialik have written books in recent years on everything from vaccination and
household cleaning products to veganism and attachment parenting. An entire
subgenre now exists of celebrity guidebooks devoted to health and fitness.
I can't help drawing comparisons between Paltrow and
Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, who, in her
best-selling book of the same name, has initiated a movement that urges women
to lean in. Although Sandberg limits
her counsel to the professional sphere, and advocates for women to more
proactively pursue career success specifically, the energy behind her urgings
has much in common with Paltrow's entreaties regarding health and fitness. For
both, success is a matter of motivation and drive. The emphasis is on
self-determination, and the responsibility to improve is placed squarely on our
own shoulders.
The faith in this kind of pursuit is very American. We
love to believe that with the right mix of moxie and hard work, we can all be corporate
executives with rock-hard abdominals. The thousand steps to attain that status
are often elided, or painted in broad strokes like, "find a mentor"
and "maximize your time at the gym." It's much simpler that way. To
elucidate those thousand steps would be messy and require lengthy chapters on class,
race, gender, economics, and social mobility, and would need detailed,
extensive endnotes and a list for additional reading. When Paltrow and Sandberg
dole out advice, they are making a pretty heavy unspoken assumption -- that the
women whom they are advising are already in a position where they can implement
that advice. And for many of their readers, this is undoubtedly the case. But
for many more women, the time required
to "transform" is a luxury they can't afford, and a seat at the
leadership table is a distant dream when they can't even get their foot in the
door.
It might be a matter of audience, then. Paltrow and
Sandberg might be speaking to someone like me -- earning enough income to
support myself, with enough leisure time that I could work on my muscle tone while also steadily climbing the
career ladder if I felt so inclined, and without many other family or social
obligations that would present obstacles to my time and energy. And that might
be why their overarching message -- that success of their variety is attainable
-- was so attractive to me. Maybe if I followed their protocol and worked hard
enough, I could transform into a goopy showrunner too.
Although I once cooked some chicken soup loosely
following a goop recipe, I have not yet truly put Paltrow's health and fitness advice
(or Sandberg's career advice, for that matter) to the test. Paltrow, at least,
is continuing to transform. I recently read that a physical goop store has
opened in Los Angeles. I happily note that we can now step bodily into goop,
try on a Beyond Yoga for goop top in the dressing room, and admire how smoothly
the Lycra stretches across our dimpled shoulders before purchasing.
Cheryl Quimba has an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University. Her poems have
appeared in Dusie, Phoebe, Tinfish, Everyday Genius, 1913, and Horseless
Review, and her chapbook, Scattered Trees Grow in Some Tundra, is
forthcoming from Sunnyoutside Press. She is the Poetry Editor of Free Inquiry
magazine, and she works for Starcherone Books and Prometheus Books in Buffalo,
New York.
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