Sex, Love & goop, and the Beliefs Nobody Had Checked

In a room made to look like a spa, in a company’s headquarters in Santa Monica, a sexologist tells a woman something about her own body that nobody had ever told her. She has believed that one part of it is too small. It is not. It is hooded, and she had never been shown. It is a small moment in a six-episode series, and it may be the most useful one.

Elsewhere in the same series, a man who has wanted sex far more often than his partner is touched lightly, is undone by it, and asks afterwards, in tears, what just happened to him; the episode is named after his question. A woman in her sixties, who says she has been ashamed of her body for almost sixty-three years, stands at a mirror while the practitioner working with her undresses and stands beside her. A couple who have been together six years, and who are afraid they are simply incompatible, hear their difference described as a difference.

The summary that accompanies Sex, Love & goop in its listings says that its couples, with the help of experts, learn “lessons and methods”. That is how it is sold, and it is easy to watch it that way, as a catalogue of techniques with a practitioner attached to each. This essay argues that it is better watched as something else. What it films, again and again, is a belief that nobody had ever checked — that a body is too small, that two people do not fit, that a body is something to be ashamed of — being checked at last against something that can answer back.

It also does something else, less often and less well. Sometimes it replaces an old belief with a new one: a type, an energy, a pattern with a name, an inheritance acted out by strangers. A new belief can be kinder than the old one and still be unchecked. And the company whose name is in the title has met unchecked claims from the other side. In 2018 prosecutors from several California counties alleged that claims it had made for three of its products, two of them sold with promises about women’s bodies, were not supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence; the company settled, saying that the settlement acknowledged no liability on its part. The series checks its couples’ beliefs. It does not check its own.

This essay takes both halves seriously. What happens to the couples is real, and they deserve to be read with care rather than with the smirk the brand’s name tends to invite. What the series sells deserves the question it does not put to itself: is this a belief being checked, or a belief being replaced?

Sex, Love & goop is a Netflix documentary series of six episodes, each between thirty and forty minutes long, all released on 21 October 2021 and produced with Boardwalk Pictures. Its host is the actor Gwyneth Paltrow, who founded the wellness company goop in 2008. She brings long-term couples to goop’s headquarters in Santa Monica to work on their sex lives with a team of practitioners, on sets made to look like a spa. Paltrow appears now and then, mostly to talk the work over with the relationship and intimacy coach Michaela Boehm; most of the series is the sessions themselves.

The practitioners are introduced with titles of their own, and this essay uses them as the series does: Jaiya, a somatic sexologist; Darshana Avila, an intimacy coach; Amina Peterson, a tantric healer; Katarina Wittich, who facilitates what are called family constellations; and Boehm. There are five couples: Erika and Damon, Felicitas and Rama, Camille and Shandra, Joie and Mike, and Dash and Sera.

Three notes before going further. The series was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as its published episode listings, recaps and reviews describe them, and nobody’s words are given as exact except the episode titles and a few phrases printed in those sources. The essay discusses the whole series, including where each couple is at the end; the section that describes the ending says so again, and a reader who would rather meet it on screen can stop there and come back.

And the people in it are real. They are couples who agreed to be filmed, and some of what they agreed to show is as private as anything a person can show. This essay reads what the series shows of them and nothing more. It diagnoses no one and passes no judgement on anyone’s body or desire, and nothing in it recommends any practitioner, product or method, or claims that any practice shown here works.

Erika and Damon have been together six years. He wants sex far more often than she does, and she has only ever reached orgasm with a vibrator. They have come because they are afraid of what those two facts might mean: that they are sexually incompatible, and that nothing can be done about it. Jaiya works with them over three days.

Felicitas and Rama have been married a long time, and they have come, in the words of the first episode’s listing, to reignite a sexual spark. Between them a pattern has grown that Boehm names bluntly, as a recap of that episode reports it: a little boy and his mother, with Rama wanting too much to please Felicitas.

Camille and Shandra are a lesbian couple carrying an upbringing that told them being gay was wrong, and each of them is ashamed of her body. Shandra has usually felt pain during sex. They work with Darshana Avila.

Joie and Mike are in their sixties, and their desire is mismatched. Joie says she has been ashamed of her body for almost sixty-three years. They work with Amina Peterson.

Dash and Sera are the exception. Their trouble, the series makes clear, is not sex but a habit they share of leaving relationships when they get hard. They work with Katarina Wittich.

Put each couple’s trouble into a sentence and most of the sentences turn out to be beliefs. We do not fit. This part of me is too small. This is what we have become. What we want is wrong. My body is something to be ashamed of. When it gets hard, one of us goes. Some of these were formed alone, some were handed down, and some grew inside the relationship itself. What they have in common is that none of them had been checked. A belief that has never been checked behaves exactly like a fact. It arranges a bed, a marriage, a life, and it never has to show its evidence.

Nobody holding one of these beliefs is foolish, and it is worth saying why. A belief can be a shelter. If two people are incompatible, nobody has to ask for anything and nobody has to be refused. If a body is simply wrong, the trouble has a reason, and a reason is easier to live with than a question. Beliefs like these are kept because they spare someone something. The couples gave that shelter up in front of a camera. The listings call them brave, and on this point the listings are right.

The plainest check comes in the fourth episode, whose listing opens with the words “Class is in session.” Jaiya shows Erika that her clitoris, which Erika had believed to be too small, is simply hooded. That is all it is, and it is worth naming plainly because the scene does: a woman is shown a fact about her own anatomy that anyone who knew what bodies are like could have shown her at any time in her adult life, and nobody had. If anything here deserves anger, it is not her, and not any one person. It is a silence in which an ordinary fact about a woman’s body can go unsaid for years.

Nothing in the moment depends on a method. No type, no energy, no practice with a name is needed to establish it. It is the plainest kind of check there is, a belief about a body set against the body, and the belief does not survive. That is what makes the scene valuable. It is also what makes it unsettling, because it raises the question of how much else in a life has been arranged around a belief that one plain sentence could have undone.

A few months later Netflix released The Principles of Pleasure, a series about pleasure and about how poorly science had understood it. Sex, Love & goop shows the same kind of not-knowing at a later stage, once it has settled inside a relationship. By then it is no longer only a gap in anyone’s knowledge. It can become part of how two people understand each other: she is the one who wants it less, and perhaps there is a reason, and perhaps the reason is her.

The same couple supply the series’ second kind of check, which is not about anatomy but about experience. Damon, the one who wanted more, is the one the series undoes. Erika, taught by Jaiya, touches him lightly, and he has what the series calls an energetic orgasm; afterwards he is in tears and asks what has just happened to him, and his question is the second episode’s title. Whatever one makes of the vocabulary, look at what the scene does to the belief they arrived with. They thought their difference meant they did not fit. On the series’ showing, the man who wanted more has been shown a kind of pleasure he did not know was there, and the woman who could reach orgasm only one way has found that she can give him one. Their difference has not gone. It has stopped meaning what they thought it meant.

This is what a belief failing a test looks like on screen. Not a method succeeding, which no viewer can verify, but a belief set against something that can answer back, and losing.

The test Erika and Damon took was set by a system. Jaiya is the creator of what she calls the erotic blueprints, five types — energetic, sensual, sexual, kinky and shapeshifter — through which she reads what arouses a person, and the series maps Erika’s and Damon’s. For a couple who had been reading their difference as a verdict, any vocabulary in which difference is ordinary would change the question.

This Library’s essay “Mating in Captivity Asks a Difficult Question: Why Can Desire Fade Inside a Loving Relationship?” argued that what flattens desire between two people is not knowledge but finality: the settled sense that the other person has been fully accounted for, a file closed on someone. Its test was simple: whether either partner has learned anything about the other this year that was not a logistical fact. Sex, Love & goop is, among other things, a machine for producing that kind of learning, and it shows something that essay did not set out to show. The file can be closed on yourself. I am the one who wants less. I am the one who is too small. Those are summaries too, and they flatten as surely as any summary of a partner.

A new vocabulary can reopen a file like that. It can also close it again, faster, because this time the summary arrives with a name and an online quiz. You are energetic; I am sexual. That can be the beginning of curiosity about each other, or the next closed file, with an official name on the cover. The test is the Mating essay’s own, turned on the name instead of the partner: does it leave two people more curious about each other, or more finished with each other?

The Journal essay “Tantra Is Not a Technique. It Is a Way of Paying Attention.” argued that the techniques sold under that word contradict one another so freely because they are scaffolding for something else, a quality of attention. The frameworks in this series contradict one another too — a typology, an energy, a leading and a following, an inheritance acted out by strangers — and it is hard to see how all of them could be true, in the way their teachers mean them, of the same five couples. But most of them are not techniques. They are names, and a name does something a technique does not. A technique tells you what to do. A name tells you what you are. That makes a name more useful than a technique when the old belief was wrong, and more dangerous when the new one is.

The series itself supplies a fair way to tell the difference. A name earns its place when it leads to something that can answer back. Erika’s and Damon’s blueprints led to an experiment, and the experiment answered. A name that leads only to itself, that can be confirmed by feeling it and by nothing else, is a new belief, however warmly it is offered.

Felicitas and Rama show both at once. The pattern Boehm names is itself a summary, and a hard one to hear: two adults described as a mother and her little boy. Then she sets them something that works less like a name than like a test. Rama is to lead, in exercises done blindfolded, and Felicitas is taught not to criticise him in the moment.

As a test, it checks something real. It asks what happens when the one who always corrects stops and the one who always tries to please leads, and the answer comes from the two of them rather than from anybody’s theory. As a name, it risks becoming the next belief: this is what we are, and now an expert has a word for it.

There is a harder question inside the exercise, and it is not the series’ question. The remedy asks the woman to hold her tongue and the man to take the lead. It can be heard as a release: a woman who has been in charge of everything is allowed, for an hour, to be in charge of nothing. It can also be heard as an old instruction in new clothes: a woman told to be quieter so that a man can feel like a man. Which it is depends on what she carries outside the room: who keeps the household’s calendar, who notices what has run out, who is always the one who knows.

The Mating essay asked who in a household can actually afford the distance the book prescribes. The same question applies to the correction. A woman who corrects may be a woman who has had to. This essay does not know whether Felicitas is one, and a bedroom exercise cannot tell.

Camille and Shandra’s beliefs were not formed alone. They were handed to them, by an upbringing that told them their desire was wrong, and by whatever taught each of them to be ashamed of her body. A belief that was handed down is harder to check than one formed alone, because checking it means disagreeing with the people who did the handing, and they are often people one has loved.

Avila works with them through mirrors and through hands-on bodywork, which the fourth episode’s listing calls sexological bodywork: a practitioner touching a client, as part of the session. It is the series’ boldest choice, and the one that drew the sharpest objections. This essay will not describe the sessions and does not need to. What matters here is what the scenes ask a viewer to accept.

The sharpest objection came from inside the field. Kerrin Bradfield, then chair of the Society of Australian Sexologists and a psychosexual therapist, told the Sydney Morning Herald, in remarks The Swaddle reported, that a sexologist does not need to touch a client, watch a client have sex or involve nudity in order to help; that the series is very focused on bodyworkers who call themselves sexologists; and that the title is not protected, so that anyone can use it, and the confusion does harm. That is a point about checking. A title is a claim, and a title that nobody protects is a claim that nobody checks. A viewer sees someone introduced as a sexologist, a coach or a healer, and has no way of knowing what, if anything, the word certifies.

The series borrows the furniture of therapy for all of this: sessions, breakthroughs, a healer. What it films is touch, given with consent, in a room set apart, with a witness. That may matter a great deal to the people in the room. It is not the same thing as treatment, and a vocabulary that blurs the two blurs a line a viewer needs kept clear. Nor can the scenes tell anyone what the touch did. This essay does not know what caused Shandra’s pain, and no viewer can. Where there is pain during sex, the first person to ask is a doctor.

Nothing in these scenes should be read as settling anything about consent, either. What the series shows is adults who agreed to be touched in a particular way, by a particular person, and to be filmed. That agreement is what made the touch theirs. A body that relaxes or responds has not given a further yes, and it has not delivered a verdict on the method; a physical response is not consent, and it is not evidence that anything works.

Joie and Mike are in their sixties, and the series takes their mismatched desire as seriously as anyone’s. Peterson has them play at being animals, and then turns to the belief Joie has carried longest. Joie says she has been ashamed of her body for almost sixty-three years. At a mirror, Peterson undresses and stands beside her.

The Journal essay “Looking at Your Body Is Not the Same as Living Inside It” argued that a mirror returns a verdict: it answers the question of whether a body is acceptable, graded against a standard. It added a warning that fits this scene closely. Loving the image is still grading; a generous judge is still a judge. Read that way, what happens at Joie’s mirror is a harsh verdict replaced by a kind one, and she is still standing outside her body, looking at it.

There is another way to see it, and this essay thinks it the truer one, though it cannot prove it. A verdict at a mirror is graded against a standard, and the standard is never a body in the room. It is a picture, a younger self, an idea of what a woman of a certain age ought to look like. That is why a belief formed at a mirror is so hard to check: there is nothing real to check it against. Peterson changes that. For a moment the mirror holds two unclothed bodies, both real, neither of them the picture. Nobody has to say anything for the standard to lose its authority. It is contradicted by a person.

It matters, too, that the practitioner makes herself as exposed as the woman she is working with. Most of the series’ authority runs one way: the expert explains, the couple learns. Here, for once, it does not. Whatever else the scene is, it is not a lesson handed down.

Whether what happens at the mirror is a kinder verdict or a check, this essay cannot settle; perhaps it is both. But the difference is worth keeping. A kinder verdict leaves the standard in place and gives her a better grade. A check takes away the standard’s claim to be the measure. The first has to be renewed every morning. The second may only need to happen once.

The fifth episode is different in kind. Dash and Sera’s trouble is leaving, not sex, and Wittich works with them through family constellations: people who have never met them stand in for members of their families, and what happens among the stand-ins is taken to show something about the family. In Sera’s constellation, the series presents what emerges as a grief handed down from her grandmother.

This essay does not know what Sera found, and does not doubt that she found something. It may have given her words for a pattern she could not name, and that may be worth a great deal. But it is a different kind of finding from Erika’s. Erika’s belief was checked against her body, and anyone with an anatomy textbook could confirm the check. Sera was given a new belief about her own history, which can be confirmed only by how it feels to her. Nothing in the room can answer back: not a body, not a partner’s response, not a fact that anyone else could look up.

A format built around breakthroughs has no way to mark that difference, because both arrive as breakthroughs, with feeling, on camera. That is the thing a viewer most needs to supply for herself: the difference between a belief that has been checked and a belief that has been replaced. The first leaves you knowing something. The second leaves you believing something else.

The company whose name is in the title has its own history with checking. On 4 September 2018, prosecutors from several California counties, members of the California Food, Drug, and Medical Device Task Force, announced a settlement with goop over three products: the Jade Egg, the Rose Quartz Egg and the Inner Judge Flower Essence Blend. According to the announcement from the Orange County District Attorney, goop had advertised that the two eggs could balance hormones, regulate menstrual cycles, prevent uterine prolapse and increase bladder control, and that the blend could help prevent depression; the prosecutors’ complaint alleged that these claims were not supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence. Under the settlement goop agreed to pay $145,000 in civil penalties and promised refunds, on request, to people who had bought the products between January and August 2017, and it was barred from making claims for its products’ efficacy without such evidence.

According to the Associated Press, a statement from goop said that the settlement acknowledged no liability on the company’s part and addressed only advertising, not the products themselves, and that there was honest disagreement between the sides. Both halves of that record belong here, and both belong to the company. None of it touches the couples in the series, who were not selling anything.

Set beside the series, the record makes an uncomfortable rhyme. The eggs were sold on the promise that a woman’s body could be regulated by an object. The best scene in the series tells a woman that the part of her body she believed was wrong was never wrong. The series is at its most valuable when it checks a belief about a woman’s body; the company behind it had its own claims about women’s bodies checked by prosecutors, who alleged that they were unsupported.

The claims made on screen are mostly of another kind. The eggs’ claims were about hormones, cycles and a bladder, things a laboratory can test and a prosecutor can take to court. The practitioners’ frameworks are about types, energies and inheritances, which are far harder to test and far harder to take to court. That is not evidence that they are false. It is a reason to hold them as the series does not: as frameworks, each belonging to the person who teaches it, rather than as findings.

Critics differed on how much of this a viewer can take away. Many came to it suspicious and left persuaded; not all did. Ashley Lara, reviewing it for The Spool, found it caught between reality-television titillation and earnest exploration, credited it with some breakthroughs for the couples, and ended on a doubt this essay shares: “Unfortunately, I doubt viewers will experience the same emotional release.”

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

The finale completes Erika and Damon’s work. Its listing says that they bring their blueprints together, and promises “a transformational orgasm” from the bodywork; nobody can check what transformational means there. In Avila’s sessions Shandra, who has usually felt pain during sex, relaxes enough to reach orgasm. A closing catch-up finds Felicitas and Rama closer, Joie and Mike matched in desire, and Dash and Sera surer of themselves as a couple. And Paltrow, who has admitted on camera that she struggles to accept how she looks as she gets older, is moved by the mirror work and says that the next phase of her own life has to be about real acceptance.

An epilogue is a report, not a check. It tells us what the couples said and what the edit kept, at a moment chosen by the people making the series, who had every reason to want the stories to end well. It would be ungracious not to be glad for them. It would be credulous to take a catch-up as evidence of what lasted. Both can be true at once, and a viewer can hold both.

Paltrow’s words about acceptance are the most interesting thing at the end of the series, because they are about neither sex nor method. The founder of a company that has sold products for women’s bodies, the eggs among them, comes to the end of a series about other people’s beliefs by naming one of her own: that how she looks as she gets older is something she has not yet accepted. Acceptance is the one lesson in the series that no product can deliver, which may be why it is also the one a wellness company will be most tempted to sell, and the essay on mirrors cited above would warn that acceptance offered at a mirror can become one more grade. Here, for a moment, it is said by the person in the series with the most to sell, about herself, as something still ahead of her.

Japan is not the subject of this series, and nothing here is a claim about how women or couples in Japan feel. But a reader here meets the question of claims in a particular form. Japan’s law on the quality, efficacy and safety of medicines and medical devices forbids anyone to advertise false or exaggerated claims about a medicine, a cosmetic or a medical device, among other products, whether openly or by implication, and forbids advertising what a medicine or a medical device does before it has been approved or certified. A line of the same kind as the one California’s prosecutors drew is written here into statute. This essay applies it to no product. The contrast is what matters. The law checks what a seller may claim a product does for a body. Nothing checks what a woman has believed about her own body for most of her life. That is left to her, and to whoever she can bring herself to ask.

The couples’ beliefs are made of plain words, and so are the checks that answer them. Too small. It hurts. We don’t fit. I’m ashamed. It is hooded. The frameworks come in another register — blueprint, energy, somatic, healer — and in Japanese most of that register would have to arrive as borrowed words written in katakana, carrying the authority of somewhere else. A borrowed word can make a subject sayable when every native word for it carries shame, and that is not nothing. But the moment in the series that does the most work is the one that needs the fewest borrowed words.

The series cannot see one further difficulty. It belongs to a reader here who speaks about love and about her body in a language she studied as a foreign one. In such a language the ready-made words for this part of life tend to come to hand first: brand words, therapy words, the words of series like this one. The plain words come much later, if at all, and the checks this essay has followed are made of plain words. It is hard to ask whether a part of you is really too small in words you have never once had to say. A belief can be easier to state in a borrowed vocabulary, and harder to check there.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first two are serious.

First, and most serious: the checks may be the edit’s, not the couples’. A format like this needs something to work in every episode, and it will find one. What looks like a belief failing a test may be a story shaped to show one failing. This essay has no answer to that, beyond the fact that its argument asks less of the series than the series asks of itself. It does not claim that any method worked. It claims only that some beliefs, on screen, met something that could answer them. The edit can arrange that meeting. It cannot invent Erika’s anatomy.

Second, and also serious: the line between checking a belief and replacing it may be too neat. Shame is not a factual belief. Joie’s almost sixty-three years cannot be refuted the way a mistaken fact about anatomy can, and what happens at her mirror may be comfort rather than correction, the kinder verdict the essay on mirrors warned about. If so, the series’ most moving scene belongs on the other side of this essay’s line, and the line is less useful than it looks.

Third, perhaps what the series shows is permission rather than checking. The Journal essay “Deep Rest Is Not Sleep. It Is Permission.” argued that a body stands down only when it receives, from outside, a signal it can believe: that nothing will be asked of it. Much of what the series films can be described that way: a practitioner undressing beside a woman, a wife told she need not correct, a man who lets himself simply receive. This essay’s answer is that the two may be one event seen from two sides. A belief such as “my body is shameful” is also a prohibition, and checking it is one of the ways permission arrives. But the permission reading may be the truer of the two, and a reader who prefers it is not wrong.

Fourth, the settlement may be carrying too much weight here. It concerned advertising for three products, in a case the company settled while saying that it disagreed, three years before the series was released. The practitioners are not the company, and the couples are not the practitioners. Using the record as a frame may be unfair to a series that, by many accounts, turned out better than the brand’s reputation had led anyone to expect. The record tells us something about the company’s past claims. It tells us nothing about whether anything in the series is true.

Fifth, a frame built on checking can become one more demand on the women it means to help. A woman who has just felt better does not need to be told to verify it. Some relief is real without being evidence of anything, and it would be a strange essay that took it away from Joie or Sera in the name of rigour. The answer is that this essay asks for no proof of comfort. It asks for wariness of promises. Those are different things, and the second is what the series, and the company behind it, most need from a viewer.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A belief that has never been checked behaves like a fact. It arranges a life without ever showing its evidence, and the series is at its most valuable when it shows one failing a test in plain view.

A new name deserves the question the old belief never got. Types, energies, patterns and inheritances can open a closed file, or close it faster. The ones worth keeping lead to something that can answer back.

The checks the series performs best need no brand: a body, a partner’s actual response, another real body at a mirror, someone who knows what bodies are like. The series had to film them inside a company’s building. They do not live there.

So, once, to you. If you have carried a belief about your body or your wanting for a long time — that you are too small, too much, too old, not made for this — it may never have been checked. That is not a failing of yours. Nobody offered to check it, and some beliefs are kept because they spare us a harder question. It deserves the question the series put to Erika’s: is this true, or has it only never been asked? And whatever arrives to replace it — a type, a word, a product — deserves the same question before you take it home.

This is a reading of a television series. It is cultural analysis, not clinical or sexual-health advice. It describes no treatment, promises no outcome and diagnoses no one, on screen or off.

It does not endorse goop, any product the company has sold, any practitioner who appears in the series or any method shown in it, and it makes no claim that any practice shown works or does not work. Anatomy is named only as the series names it.

The couples are real people who agreed to be filmed. Nothing here judges their bodies, their desire or their choices, and nothing said about the company’s record applies to them or to the practitioners.

The 2018 settlement is reported from the prosecutors’ announcement and from the company’s statement as the Associated Press reported it, and no view of the products is offered beyond what the announcement says. Japanese law is described, not applied to any product or person, and nothing here is legal advice.

The difference between a belief checked and a belief replaced is this Library’s own distinction, an argument rather than a finding, and no statistic appears anywhere in the essay.

What do you believe about your body that has never once been checked, and who would you trust to check it?

Which of your beliefs about your own desire did you form alone, and which were handed to you by someone else?

The last time you were given a name for yourself or your relationship — a type, a pattern, a diagnosis — did it make you more curious, or more finished?

When someone offers to improve something about your body, what exactly are they claiming, and could anyone check it?

If a belief you hold turned out to be only a belief, what would you then have to ask for that it has spared you asking?