【Watch Mound Daughter】

Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle enterpriseGoop has become known as much for its celebrity heritage as for its dubious "wellness" tips. The Watch Mound Daughterpublication has come under fire for imparting "wisdom" like putting a rock—ahem, gem—in one's vaginafor sexual empowerment, and losing weight quickly by not eating.

Selling snake oil on the internet was one of its first uses, (probably third after uploading cat videos and trolling) so we're almost inured to the Goops of the world now. But there's a dark side to those campaigns we shouldn't overlook: the catastrophic emotional cruelty Goop inflicts on its readers.

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We live in an era of unprecedented anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 18 percent of American adults have an anxiety disorder and women are 60 percent more likely to experience an anxiety disorder in their lifetimes. In fact, just being femaleis listed as a risk factor.

Into this context, enter Goop, which could rename it’s “Do” section “things to be worried about.” Goop publishes discredited or blatantly untrue information, like the idea that bras cause breast cancer (they don't) or the Epstein-Barr virus is at the root of many chronic illnesses (it isn't). When they’re rightfully called out for irresponsibly promoting these ideas, they justify it in the name of "conversation." Note: A good rule of thumb is that if you rest on the "just asking questions" defense, you're being an asshole.

Goop exploits the emotional effects of its ideas on its readers by giving them things to buy in order to assuage the anxiety they’ve created. But they entirely sidestep the fallout when these sham suggestions invariably fail when held up against basic science.

Leading the charge against Goop's insights—and other affronts to common sense—has been Jen Gunter, who is doing the Lord’s work as she cuts Goop to ribbonson the issue of scientific accuracy.

Gunter writes detailed postson her blog railing against the distortion and pseudoscience of the mainstream wellness industry. Naturally, Goop's a frequent target.(Goop, for their part, has defended itself with awhiny rebuke.)

In one particularly striking anecdote, Gunter talks about counseling a patientwho was distraught after a breast cancer diagnosis. Specifically, she was worried that she had caused her own cancer by wearing a bra, a theory Goop continues to cover despite it being widely discredited. According to CrowdTangle, a social monitoring agency, Goop’s post on underwire bras and cancer was seen by nearly 500,000 people just on the store’s social accounts, eventually reaching about 1 million people.

Think about that for a second. Goop spreads anxiety-causing pseudoscience out into the world in order to sell its wares, and yet, its readers have no direct path to hold the company accountable.

When the rubber hits the road and there’s a real medical issue, doctors and patients are the ones who have to actually dealwith it. Paltrow, meanwhile, is sitting in her impeccable living room doing who knows what, but it's highly unlikely that she's consoling a distraught woman with cancer. Paltrow and Goop have nothing to offer these women but nagging doubt, self-recrimination, and green juice.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Bad science is just part of the problem. It's how Goop makes readers feelthat's just as damaging.

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It would be easy to write Goop offas a just another thirst-driven lifestyle brand if it weren’t messing with something so important, namely the difficult human work of wading through complicated information and then living with the outcome.

If you're questioning the power of a celebrity lifestyle brand to spread damaging misinformation, look at the wave of vaccine skepticism that has swept the U.S. in the past 10 years. Based on research that was so bad it resulted in the revocation of the medical license of the doctor who authored it, millions of parents and childbearing-adjacent people started wondering if the greatest public health advance in the last century was actually harming children by causing autism. It was contrarian, yes, but, on top of that, it offered an easy, clear answer drawing a line between vaccines and autism rates.

But more important than any of the vaccination blame actually being true, it was something that felt plausible.

Here again, we have celebrities "just asking questions" and fueling the fires of doubt.

At arguably the height of her influence, Oprah made former Playboy playmate Jenny McCarthy, mother of an autistic son, into the poster celebrity vaccine skeptic. On an Oprahepisode in 2007, McCarthy told the story of her son's autism diagnosis and subsequent "recovery," going heavy on the tragedy and mothers' intuition. Implicit in her narrative was the idea that autism was curable (if you just tried hard enough, early enough) and avoidable (if only the doctors would listen to the mothers who know best).

None of this was scientifically sound, but for parents worried about the autism they could see — as opposed to the rubella they’d never encountered — it was a heady proposition.

I should know, I was one of them.

In many ways I was the targetaudience for vaccine skepticism: white, well-educated, relatively affluent, and female. Also, crucially, I had a personal stake in the idea of not wanting my medical decisions governed by the perceived interests of pharmaceutical companies.

In early 2007, a few months before Oprah pushed McCarthy into households nationwide, the first version of the HPV vaccine Gardasil was released. The valuable public health advance was quickly overshadowed by the news that its maker Merck & Co. was lobbying for states to make the brand-new vaccine compulsory for all girls in public school. The backlash was loud and long and continues to haunt Rick Perry. I can't help but think that perhaps McCarthy wouldn't have found such fertile ground without the tilling done by a bad rollout of a vaccine characterized as forcing parents to inoculate their pre-teen daughters--and only their daughters--against a sexually-transmitted infection.

Then, years later, I got pregnant. Realizing my impending motherhood would require some resolution on the question of vaccinations, I found the book On Immunity: An Inoculationby Eula Biss. It was one of the few voices that recognized and articulated the history of political and moral gray areas around vaccination and presented these ideas alongside hard science.

After all, there's great political power in a government's ability—and decision—to inoculate populations against life-threatening diseases. But power is separate from scientific fact, and science is a lot easier to accept when its advocates can also acknowledge complicated politics.

And so I accepted science, but it was a long road.

But Goop only pretendsto give its audience that kind of information. It deprives them of knowledge and, in turn, the power to make informed decisions.

If you have cancer, is it serving you to worry that your bra gave it to you?

Which brings us back to Paltrow, Gunter’s cancer patient, and a classic economic question: Who pays for the lunch we all know isn't free?

Emotional anguish is a terrible expense, and peoplepay when luxury lifestyle charlatans like Goop seed their natural anxieties with lies, and then profit from their fears. People pay when they spend their time, money, and energy worrying about preposterous things because a company dressed up nonsense ideas to make them look reasonable out of disingenuous concern. And people pay in cash, which Goop takes to the bank.

Bad things happen. They happen to us all. And Goop has nothing more to offer than a nagging voice in their readers’ heads, which will speak in the dulcet tones of money and privilege and whisper, Maybe it’s all your fault.

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