UrbanUpdate

“This will sting for about 30 minutes,” the nice man wearing the white “In Goop Health” tee said before his assistant jabbed a three-inch needle full of B vitamins into my butt cheek, a quarter of which was bared for everyone at New York’s Pier 17 to see.

B12 is for energy and red blood cell health. B6, on the other hand, is a party vitamin that taps your serotonin and dopamine receptors. After composing myself and returning my haunch into my track pants—“athleisure” was the firmly suggested attire for the day—I felt nothing. Later, it did sting. But I also felt a lightness of being, akin to the way you feel after a good bowel movement.

From there on out, I floated around In Goop Health with a nice, subtle vitamin buzz in my head and a slight muscle spasm in my rear. IGH was the second Goop summit, and New York City’s first, hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow and attended by rich moms from all over. Tickets ran $650 a pop for the lower tier and $2,000 for the upper tier, which includes an invite to “cocktails with GP” at the end of the day. IGH is meant to be a real-life manifestation of Goop, the lifestyle brand-slash-website where Paltrow distributes occasionally out-there health and life advice, and the beauty and wellness products to back it up. I found myself here, enjoying activations like Face Cupping (the Michael Phelps thing but on your face and without the bruises), eating probiotic superfoods, drinking moon juice, undergoing self-hypnosis, and generally diving head first into Goopiness. I came to the summit because, if I’m being honest, I’d already Gooped up my life, somewhat unintentionally, over the past year. This is what happens when you’re the grooming editor at GQ: You start by doing some yoga, then you begin to moisturize, then you try out meditation, then you get your first facial, and soon enough, getting vitamins injected into your ass just doesn’t seem that crazy.

Not that I've forsaken all skepticism. I sat with a woman who claimed to have clairvoyance and extra-strong intuition. I had some magnetic acupressure and a jeweled bindi placed over my third eye in order to get my electromagnetic field recalibrated. She asked if I had any big existential questions bugging me, and I mentioned that I kept hearing the phrase “Print is dead” in my head. But when she said I should ignore those voices because they’re creating negativity, let’s say I wasn’t 100 percent convinced that she had a clairvoyant grasp of my particular industry’s economic viability in the digital age. On the other hand, I did feel pretty vibe-y.

The pitch of glee in the takedowns has been reduced from Twitter-friendly scathing to CBS-approved good fun.

For all the excesses, the vaguely medicinal and the borderline-quacky stuff Goop's pushing, the movement—and its followers—put a finger on something that I’ve very slowly started to realize is missing from my own life. (Other than a jade egg anal suppository for absorbing and dispelling negative energy.) Goop espouses a level of personal care that, as I approach 30, I’m beginning to think I’ve been derelict on. My hangovers are worse. My memory is increasingly shitty. Devouring massive chocolate chip cookies after lunch doesn't even bring the brief sugar-and-comfort high it used to. Does that mean I’ll be shelling out for a $75-a-month vitamin supplement subscription? No. (Okay. Maybe.) But I am curious about improving my brain health and my diet, and maybe even having a trippy out-of-body experience. So I wondered: was there room at Goop for a guy like me?

There’s another reason I entered In Goop Health with an open mind, determined not to use it for target practice. It was only seven months ago that Goop held its first wellness summit in Los Angeles. That event provoked the usual Internet chorus of mockery, accusations of quackery, and the gleeful tearing down of a very famous person who also happens to be an unusually successful female entrepreneur and a celebrated actress. A lot has happened since June, including Paltrow herself coming forward to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, a disclosure that helped precipitate the #MeToo movement.

Since then, the pitch of glee in the takedowns has been reduced from Twitter-grade napalm to CBS-approved good fun. That’s in large part because Paltrow was early to embrace the idea of wellness, a trend that’s becoming more of a cultural shift with each Instagram Story-fied face mask. She rolled out her e-commerce just as the market for vitamin supplements surged, and Goop is seemingly raking it in. Tickets for the summit sold out. Goop's raised $25 million in venture capital funding, and now employs more than 100 people, mostly women. (Full disclosure: a more recent venture, Goop magazine, is published in partnership with Condé Nast, which owns GQ.) Paltrow’s incontrovertibly a powerhouse businessperson, no matter where you land on the quackery factor.

Which, yeah...depending on your trust in the ethereal, the spiritual, the existence of chi and centered-ness and cosmic energy, the quackery is still there. As Quartz discovered, a bunch of the supplements available on Goop's site were also available on Infowars, Alex Jones’s emporium for conspiracy-theories and alt-right wellness. And back at the summit, a psychic medium named Laura Lynne Jackson told an audience at In Goop Health that “death does not exist"—which would be a intriguing philosophical addition to the syllabus of a conference so dedicated to preserving vitality if Jackson weren't being very literal. She believes she can commune with the dead, and I watched as she did a live session, reaching out to the deceased relatives of crowd members. “This might end in tears,” Jackson said. It did.

She started by asking a middle-aged woman a series of questions that all seemed vague and open-ended enough to provide decent escape hatches if they didn’t land. Jackson's performance was powerful. Really. When she found a truffle—somebody meaningful who had left this particular incarnation—she was great at delving deeper. Soon her subject, and the subject’s sister and daughter sitting next to her, began crying. It looked like a cathartic experience. Whatever thoughts I had about emotional exploitation that I went in with made me feel like a scrooge after watching the session.

Also, the medium swore that the Philadelphia Eagles were going to win the Super Bowl. Depending on your faith and access to a bookie, that knowledge alone should be worth the $650 entry fee.

There weren’t very many men at the summit. In fact, I only met two who actually paid for their tickets, and I talked to nearly every dude out of the 600-plus people in attendance. The majority of the guys there were working, presenting on a panel, covering the event for a media outlet, or supporting a friend or partner. There is one prominent male fan of Goop, though. He wasn’t at the summit, but he did have Paltrow on his show the night before. His name is Stephen Colbert.

Colbert appears to be genuinely tickled by Goop, seeing it as a reflection of our society’s gullibility, and has riffed on it multiple times: in June around the time of the first summit, and way back in 2015, when he introduced his own lifestyle brand, Covetton House, which espouses “shabby elegance.” The night before, he'd interviewed Paltrow, and then they compared products from their two brands. (Colbert was jealous that Paltrow’s green juice included “the tears of butterflies shed during Oprah's Golden Globes speech.") They also introduced a collaboration on Goop.com with some spoof products: the Manifestation Loofah, which is made of sustainably foraged nylon, and the Insight Wedge, a doorstop that keeps metaphorical doors open. Both are $900.

“Which is obviously a joke,” Paltrow told me when the publicists brought me for my allotted audience with the high priestess of all things Goop. “But Twitter thought it wasn’t a joke, which is like, ‘Oh, come on guys.’ ” The glowing woman—her skin was healthy and bright to the point of being blinding—listened intently to my questions and responded with beaming charisma. Gwyneth Paltrow is, admittedly, a very compelling advertisement for Goop.

The funny—and scary—part, as one of Goop’s publicists informed me, is that even though the Colbert products were described in clearly ludicrous terms (“Whisper your hopes and dreams into the sponge’s aspiration crevice”) and marked as “sold out,” a small number of people still signed up for the waitlist to buy them.

“Oh shit,” Paltrow said when I relayed this information to her. “That means I’m doing something both really right and really wrong.”

The right stuff that she’s doing—and this is Goop’s redeeming virtue—is getting people to think about health in ways beyond just going to the doctor for some antibiotics. It’s packaged in language that’s easy to ridicule, and Goop sells some genuinely ridiculous products, but among the core issues Goop advocates for are preventative care, mental health, nutrition, and fitness. Basically everything that’s not covered by the traditional Western doctor in a white coat with latex-covered hands, but we know to be necessary.

“We’re moving the needle forward culturally in terms of autonomy over health, emboldening people to ask questions,” Paltrow said. “The only thing that bothers me sometimes about the pushback is that inherent in it is, ‘Don’t ask that question.’ ”

So I followed up with a less critical, more personal question. It touched on the same issue former Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Elaine Welteroth sounded off on during the summit's climactic panel, which also included Chelsea Handler, Drew Barrymore, Laura Linney, and Gillian Flynn. Someone in the crowd had a question for Welteroth, along these lines: I’m so glad my 11-year-old daughter can read Teen Vogue and learn about gender in politics. But what about my 13-year-old boy?

“The reality is that we need them for change to actually happen,” Welteroth said. “I worry a lot about boys being left behind in this movement right now. It feels so women-led, and we are so loud and we are so powerful and it’s so important and we need this space to be this way. But it is extraordinarily intimidating for a little boy who doesn’t know what’s happening to figure out an entry point into this. How to be an ally. One of my concerns is, if we don’t extend a hand and invite boys to the table right now, we are actually raising a generation of angrier boys who become angrier men who become even more predatory.”

So I asked Gwyneth roughly the same thing. What about me? What about the Goop Boys? “We don’t exclude men at all,” she said. “We probably can make content that’s more geared to men. But it’s really for everybody, whether it’s food content or wellness content or travel content. All the content is unisex. But we can get better at that.”

Then she told me to have a fabulous day, and was whisked away to her next four-minute interview.

And you know what? I did have a fabulous day. After my brief moment in Paltrow’s radiant presence, I went into a yoga room with a panoramic view of the East River at dusk and did some breathing exercises, which flooded my brain with so much oxygen that I felt like I’d done a wellness whippet. (The instructor said these exercises can get you “cosmically high.”) And then I wobbled back outside after nearly 10 hours of Goop indoctrination with a realization: Even if I don’t plan on spending my money on anything containing spirulina, or paying a medium to “talk” to my dead granddad for me, I will definitely be doing more of those breath exercise whippets, and also self-hypnotizing my way out of concerns about my dying industry. I was still hungry after the Goop lunch, so maybe I won’t cut out cheeseburgers completely. But despite my bone-deep Puritan skepticism, I left the summit secure in the knowledge that I’m a real Goop Boy now.

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