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Gwyneth Paltrow in 2020!

Have the Americans found a celebrity to take on Trump?

Shannon Rupp 16 Aug 2018TheTyee.ca

Shannon Rupp was a Tyee contributing editor. For permission to reprint this article please contact the author: shannon(at)shannonrupp.com.

A magnificent profile of Gwyneth Paltrow in the New York Times last month suggests that there could be a presidential candidate on the horizon with the stuff to take on U.S. President Donald Trump.

“How Goop’s haters made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company worth $250 million,” is a wickedly funny look at the new Oprah. But as the newspaper’s astute commenters note, Paltrow is also a lot like Trump: she embraces alternative facts along with alternative therapies.

Although she has never whispered a hint of going into politics, Gwynnie seems almost as preoccupied with pussy as the current president. A few years ago, she was scorned and skewered for her recommendation to steam the vajayjay with mugwort. Then she started selling jade eggs to be worn in the yoni (which is a scandalous misuse of gemstones, I say).

Both were hot topics in the Twitterverse, which only served to boost sales — the jade eggs are just US$66 on her lifestyle website.

According to the piece, Paltrow calls this kind of attention a cultural firestorm (although it is better known as outrage marketing). It triggers the chattering classes to start chattering online, which in turn drives traffic to her site. Reportedly, she gets about 2.4 million hits a day and her newsletter, Goop, which launched in 2008, has about two million subscribers.

“I can monetize those eyeballs,” Paltrow told business students at Harvard, while insisting that it’s not clickbait. “It’s a cultural firestorm when it’s about a woman’s vagina.”

Laughing with the haters

If you’ve heard of the former Hollywood actress at all in the last few years, it’s likely due to those public scoldings she gets from doctors and scientists. She calls them The Haters, and they seem to be an integral part of her self-promotion campaign.

Among the high profile Haters are a couple Canadians who have been trying to prevent the creeping quackery. I salute them! And retweet them. But I fear they’re preaching to the converted (and we’re an ever-shrinking audience).

Dr. Jen Gunter is a Winnipegger who trained at the University of Manitoba and the University of Western Ontario and practises obstetrics and gynecology in San Francisco. Working in California’s woo-woo central, she saw how harmful the medical misinformation was, and how fast it was spreading, so she began blogging to counteract the nonsense.

Soon she was writing for various news outlets including the NY Times, frequently about goopiness. Inevitably it led her to attend one of the Goop “summits” where tickets start at US$500 and can climb to $4,500 if you want to break ancient grains with GP herself. It’s funny. Well, funny for non-believers. Angry Goopers will subject you to a long harangue about how mean this review is and how much the “wellness” site helped them.

Online Dr. Gunter can often be found in the company of another Canadian-to-make-us-proud, Tim Caulfield. His most recent book, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? got nothing but praise when it came out in 2015. Caulfield trained as a lawyer and his day job is as a professor in the School of Law and Public Health at the University of Alberta. But his métier is as a debunker.

Hopeless fame-seekers

Anyone interested in this decade’s boom in populist movements will be intrigued by Caulfield’s research into the trend’s curious companion: the longing for fame. For decades researchers have been documenting the increasing number of students who want to be famous. They trace it to different things including an increase in narcissism and the arrival of social media. But those seem more like symptoms than causes.

Caulfield noticed something interesting about fame-seeking: it’s more common in countries that celebrate fame as an end in itself and also have relatively low scores on those U.N. happiness reports. The U.S., the U.K. and South Korea all fit the bill.

“These same celebrity loving countries also have a terrible record when it comes to social mobility,” Caulfield writes, reporting that at the time of his writing, the U.K. was last in those rankings among 34 nations in the Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and the Development. The U.S. was third from last. (Canada, along with the Scandinavian countries, scores high in those happiness and social mobility measures.)

Caulfield’s theory is that citizens who have no path up the socio-economic ladder will be inclined to see fame as their best shot at the good life, and obsess over it.

Celebrities: just like us

And that’s where the celebrity worship comes in. It’s comforting to know that someone — especially someone “just like us” — made it. Even if fans never become famous themselves they can get a vicarious thrill out of following the likes of Paltrow. They can buy her clothes, cookbooks and supplements and live a life that approximates hers.

Throw in regular contact via social media and they can even support an illusion that they are friends. At the very least they can identify themselves as part of her tribe of spiritualists.

Of course Paltrow is anything but just like us. Like Trump she inherited her success. She’s Hollywood royalty: her mother is actress Blythe Danner and her late father was producer Bruce Paltrow. Even by the standards of Tinseltown’s rich-and-famous, she has a privileged background. She landed her first job in one of her father’s films when she was 17, skipped theatre school altogether and went straight into a big-money movie career.

A disposition of populists

On July 25 one the Times commenters on the Paltrow piece, “Jimmy, in Manhattan” observed that, “To this NY’er, reading endlessly about the travesty called Trump, Goop is the flipside of the MAGA for dismayed east coast elites.”

He’s not wrong. As David Marquand, an Oxford political science professor, writes in the New Statesman: “Populism is not a doctrine or a governing philosophy, still less an ideology. It is a disposition, perhaps a mood, a set of attitudes and above all a style.”

After a 2015 measles outbreak in Marin County, California — one of the wealthiest communities in the U.S. — researchers began looking at why supposedly educated people were not vaccinating their children. They found the usual suspects: celebrity anti-vaxxers. But they also found that a growing number of people believed marketing hype while mistrusting authorities — in other words, populism wasn’t happening just among the poor and poorly educated, who often voted conservative, it was happening among liberals too.

Then a State University of New York sociologist spotted something interesting in the numbers. While there was no right/left split among the anti-vaxxers, there was a split between political moderates and political extremists. The more intense the political views (at either end of the spectrum) the more likely they were to be suspicious of vaccines.

In other words, the New Age is where the populists meet.

Charismatic feet

New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profile of Paltrow is a delightful read. Witty. Clever. And very telling, as she discusses Paltrow’s many inherited gifts, including her elegant feet.

“Her feet were bare now, and they had a perfect, substantial arch, just as the Romans intended, engineered to support her statue body. I bet they were a Size 8. People make shoes so that feet like those can wear them,” she writes, tongue firmly in cheek.

She also notes that a search of Paltrow’s name in the LexisNexis databank turns up the word “luminous” next to it, 227 times.

It’s a reminder that Paltrow in her heyday was one of those 1990s It Girls whose glamourous life was covered more extensively than her acting. More extensively even than Trump in that era, when he was celebrated for his bankruptcies and tiny hands.

Suddenly, I could just see political strategists sitting up and taking notice: those feet! that glow! her belief in the wisdom of ignorance! That all adds up to the kind of charisma that can now win elections.

Mark my words: she’s a populist political leader in the making. Another Trump, but with good manners and beautiful hair. (Remember how that combo worked for Justin Trudeau?)

Come to think of it, GP could probably win just by luring more women to the polls, which wouldn’t be hard to if she offered them some magical souvenir for voting... like maybe a jade egg?

© Shannon Rupp. For permission to reprint this article please contact the author: shannon(at)shannonrupp.com  [Tyee]

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