Sex, Love & goop
セックスと愛とグープ
Discussed in the Journal
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The whole story, ending included.
Five couples work with somatic and intimacy coaches on camera; the closest a mainstream platform has come to showing tantra-adjacent practice.
In this six-episode series Gwyneth Paltrow, founder of the wellness company goop, brings long-term couples to its Santa Monica headquarters to work on their sex lives with a team of practitioners. Paltrow appears now and then to talk the work over with the relationship coach Michaela Boehm; most of the series is the sessions themselves, on spa-like sets.
Erika and Damon, together six years, fear they are sexually incompatible: he wants sex far more often than she does, and she reaches orgasm only with a vibrator. The sexologist Jaiya maps their different 'erotic blueprints', shows Erika that her clitoris, which she thought too small, is simply hooded, and teaches her to give Damon an 'energetic' orgasm that leaves him in tears. Long-married Felicitas and Rama have slid into a mother-and-little-boy pattern; Boehm has Rama lead in blindfolded exercises and teaches Felicitas not to criticise in the moment. Camille and Shandra, a lesbian couple carrying an anti-gay upbringing and shame about their bodies, work with the intimacy coach Darshana Avila, who uses mirrors and hands-on bodywork; Shandra, who usually feels pain with penetration, relaxes enough to reach orgasm. Joie and Mike, in their sixties, have mismatched desire; the tantric healer Amina Peterson has them play at being animals, then undresses beside Joie at a mirror to counter the body shame Joie has carried for almost sixty-three years.
In episode five Dash and Sera, whose trouble is not sex but a habit of leaving relationships when they get hard, have strangers stand in for their families in a family-constellations session with Katarina Wittich; Sera's constellation reveals a grief handed down from her grandmother. The finale completes Erika and Damon's work; a closing catch-up finds Felicitas and Rama closer, Joie and Mike matched in desire, and Dash and Sera surer as a couple. Moved by the mirror work, Paltrow says the next phase of her own life has to be about real acceptance.
Starring
Gwyneth PaltrowHost
The actor and founder of goop, who hosts the series and admits her own struggle to accept how she looks as she ages.
Michaela BoehmHerself
A relationship and intimacy coach who works with Felicitas and Rama and talks the whole process through with Paltrow.
JaiyaHerself
A somatic sexologist who coaches Erika and Damon for three days through what she calls their erotic blueprints.
Darshana AvilaHerself
An intimacy coach who works with Camille and Shandra through mirror work and hands-on bodywork.
Amina PetersonHerself
A tantric healer who works with Joie and Mike on mismatched desire and on Joie's lifelong shame about her body.
Why it matters
Sex, Love & goop arrived with baggage. goop had paid a settlement in 2018 over unfounded health claims, one of them for a jade egg sold for the vagina, and critics came to the series suspicious. Most of them left persuaded: the Guardian called it possibly the only truly valuable thing goop had made, and the New Yorker ended in admiration. Its subjects are ordinary and hard: mismatched desire, anatomy nobody had explained, pain during sex, a lesbian couple unlearning shame, a woman in her sixties who has disliked her body all her life. Its boldest choice is to show hands-on bodywork, a practice the New Yorker described as controversial and illegal in almost every American state except California, which leaves open where the line between therapy and touch should run. What stays with the viewer is simpler: adults discovering, late, that not knowing about sex is not a failure.