How to have sex like Gwyneth Paltrow

 Forget vagina-scented candles and jade eggs, Goop’s ‘ideator-in-chief’ has a new venture – offering intimacy advice to the masses.

It’s fair to say most women who win high-profile court cases don’t celebrate victory by launching an erotic Instagram account. But Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t your everyday defendant, or even your run-of-the-mill Hollywood goddess. In fact, she appears to be vigorously auditioning for the US sexologist-in-chief job left vacant after Shere Hite’s death in 2020.

Her lifestyle website Goop famously hit the headlines for endorsing intimate products in 2015 with the suggestion women should “steam-clean” their vaginas for extra energy, prompting one friend to say, “Well, it would certainly make me run a four-minute mile”. Then there was the jade “yoni egg” debacle of 2018 when Goop had to pay $145,000 for making “unsubstantiated” claims about the egg’s benefits.

Two years later Goop’s “ideator-in-chief” (that would be Paltrow) launched a $75 candle named “This Smells Like My Vagina”, leading to a host of parody versions, including “This Smells Like a Yeast Infection”. Then Netflix launched Sex, Love & goop, bringing couples’ sex therapy to the masses. (Some cynical souls questioned how much therapy was needed to solve the sexual frustration of a woman whose partner didn’t go in for foreplay and thought the whole palaver was over after he’d had an orgasm.)

Now a none-too-noticeably sex-starved world is offered further erotic musings by Paltrow’s @goopsex on Instagram. I spent an evening curled up in bed with the account to date to see what it might add to my sexual hinterland. Each post has either a short caption, such as “How to get out of an intimacy rut”, or a tasteful photo; the browser then follows the link in the bio to a longer post on goop’s website. There are subjects such as “Sexuality after Cancer” and “Five helpful things to know about sex after childbirth”, alongside the more direct “Which vibrator is best for you?”. It’s a bit like Sex and the City without the female friends, laughs or drama.