Gwyneth Paltrow irritates people. These days it’s what she does best, or at least most lucratively, for all her undoubted talent as an actor. If she’s not earnestly explaining how everyone could have a divorce as perfectly civilised as her own, then she’s evangelising about “vaginal steaming” (some herbal-based load of old hooey for cleansing parts of your innards that didn’t need cleansing in the first place) or flogging ludicrously expensive nonsense through her lifestyle website Goop. She has a remarkable ability to set people’s teeth on edge by doing nothing very much, which has carved out a unique space for her in the culture as one of those people who shouldn’t matter nearly as much as they do.
But what wasn’t so obvious until this week is that if Paltrow annoys you, that’s probably no longer an accident. It’s now a business strategy, and one with ominous implications for the rest of us.
The method behind the hippy madness is laid bare in an extraordinary New York Times Magazine profile this week, in which Gwynnie explains her business philosophy: she has learned to turn the irrational hatred she evokes into cold, hard cash.
What she calls the “cultural firestorms” – those moments when gynaecologists understandably rail against women paying good money to risk scalding their cervix, or when she’s asked how on earth she can justify selling $500 trousers in an America where so many are on the breadline – actually work in her favour. Each one sends people racing to her site to see what all the fuss is about and, as she explains, “I can monetise those eyeballs”. While they’re there, people might buy something despite themselves, or at least provide fodder for advertisers. Never mind Ivanka Trump’s failed fashion line, Goop is arguably the first multimillion-dollar lifestyle business based on the Trumpian political model that haters gonna hate, but at least they also gonna pay attention. But don’t expect it to be the last, if only because anger so demonstrably pays now.
Put Steve Bannon on talk radio, and people will tune in just to see if he’s as hateful as everyone says. Give Piers Morgan a breakfast show and people will watch purely to see how awful he is. If a woman journalist who calls herself “literally a communist” is willing to come on and shout at him that he’s an idiot, so much the better – lots of people hate communists too, so Ash Sarkar will get booked again. Close your eyes to the fact that you’re normalising that which is not normal, and there’s money to be made here.
All Paltrow has done is to turn the journalistic concept of “hate clicks”, or the discovery that an awful lot of online traffic can be generated by saying something so mad that millions will furiously disagree with it, into an efficient means of selling handbags. The more nonsensical the ideas she peddles – that negative feelings can change the structure of water; that bras carry the toxic residues of old relationships; that it might improve your sex life to shove this £66 egg-shaped piece of jade inside yourself, on the grounds that concubines allegedly used to do it – the better. Her defiant response to criticism from mainstream doctors, in which she argues that science doesn’t have all the answers and anyway all she’s doing is giving room to alternative views, will further infuriate those who think she’s dangerously undermining belief in scientific expertise. But so what? Every new row gets people clicking. It’s a fake news-style strategy, but for face creams.
The truly depressing implication, however, is that if anger can be harnessed to sell one kind of consumer product then there’s no reason it couldn’t work for others. In a culture already seemingly saturated with rage, there may be scope for much more of it yet.
What’s fascinating is that Paltrow seems so clear-eyed about what she’s doing. “Vagina, vagina, vagina!” she hollers at a class of Harvard business students, who want to know what gets people talking about her business. It’s seemingly no accident that so many of Goop’s hot-button moments, from the infamous V-steam process to the jade eggs, have a distinctly gynaecological flavour.
Is she equally aware of what she’s doing when she entertains the New York Times Magazine reporter at home, wearing a perfect white dress to cook clams in her perfect kitchen, while her perfectly behaved children show off their musical talents in the background and her perfectly adoring lover dances attention? One wonders. The reporter certainly goes home reflecting bitterly on why her kid refuses even to practise the flute and why she doesn’t have a body like Paltrow’s, which is the effect the “wellness” industry usually has on its customers; it makes you feel there’s something wrong with you, which could be rectified only by buying these eye-wateringly expensive supplements.
But if Goop was just another glorified fashion and beauty business cashing in on female self-loathing, it probably wouldn’t be worth $250m. What Paltrow has done is to go one step further, and make money out of getting people to loathe her instead.
It’s clever, in a terrifyingly postmodern sort of way – impressive even, if viewed as an act of turning the tables after all those years in which other people made fortunes from her unpopularity instead. For years every pound gained, every stray remark that could be used to make a female celebrity sound bad has been worth good money to men running parts of the media, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before one of them decided to grab a piece of that action for herself. So now Paltrow is laughing all the way to the bank, and the joke is on the rest of us. Only somehow, it no longer feels quite so funny.