TVIn ‘Sex, Love & Goop’ we are introduced to energetic orgasms and a partner has to watch as her fiancé is stimulated by an erotic consultant. The Netflix reality series is the latest high-profile convulsion of Gwyneth Paltrow, who has made her living from dubious wellness exploits and vagina candles. But is it all quack anointing? Or is this the sex education lesson we’ve been waiting for all our lives? Evelien Delgouffe is looking for it our Viewing Guide out for you.
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It’s extremely easy to make fun of a Hollywood star who turned CEO of a wellness and lifestyle empire that markets vagina candles and now also wants to bombard our sex lives with pseudoscientific practices that may be legal in California, but the rest of the world and public health still raise serious questions. Our knives to cut this series to shreds were sharpened before we even saw a second. But then we suddenly learned about so-called sexual blueprints, dry-fucking took on a new, fascinating meaning and we found out that a clitoris in its entire anatomy is remarkably similar to the ‘Squid Game’ logo. Before we knew it, we were educating our closest friends, immediate family members and even distant colleagues about this surprisingly revealing series called ‘Sex, Love & Goop’.
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In ‘Sex, Love & Goop’, Gwyneth Paltrow sends five diverse couples to sex camp to improve their intimate relationships in front of the camera and with the help of a handful of precocious sex therapists, intimacy coaches and erotic consultants. If you are already getting unwanted flashbacks to ‘Sex Tape’, that monstrosity of a sex program by Goedele Liekens, then we can reassure you: you will not see pants falling on your ankles here, nor will you see couples giving a fuck while their chihuahua explores the limits of his bulging eyeballs. So forget about the shooting locations that look like tacky porn villas in which deeply deflated sexologists rule. In this decor, everything is light, airy and stylistically zen. The couples come together in the headquarters of Gwyneth’s empire ‘Goop’, where they first share their sexual concerns in groups and then we get to follow their individual sessions with their therapist up close. And when we say “close” we mean that at some point we attend a “sexual bodywork” session where a partner has to watch her fiancé get vaginally stimulated by an “erotic completeness coach.” And we see a sturdy male moaning, trembling and even whining after an energetic orgasm that barely involved a touch. Unless these couples are the best actors in the world, we stood open-mouthed as these therapists revealed their practices to us and their subjects, and slowly but surely slipped into a “sexistential crisis” where we began to seriously question whether we’ve been doing ‘it’ wrong all our lives.
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This series leaves no doubt that porn is not the right school for sex education. Although it is especially striking how much broader it goes than just sex. In this series, a remarkable amount of attention is paid to communication, self-image, physical and emotional trauma and how these have an effect on the libido. Taboos are also broken about senior sex, kinky sex and lesbian sex. In terms of clickbait, Netflix has everything to gain when these programs are extremely embarrassing or bizarre, but Gwyneth Paltrow – who is very discreet and curious throughout the series – seems to have succeeded in creating a layered program about sex and intimacy. making things that young, old, full, thin, straight and gay can learn from. It makes us question whether the Marvel star is really as crazy as we thought, or whether it really means well with the well-being of her fellow human beings and female well-being in particular. Something we wouldn’t expect from someone who, years ago, wanted to saddle us with a machine to clean our wombs or special stones to heal our yoni, thus contributing to the notion that women should always strive for unattainable and above all unaffordable perfection.
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With this series, Paltrow actually brings therapies, which are usually reserved for the rich & famous, to a worldwide audience for the price of a Netflix subscription. You can’t keep struggling for that. Time to open up, talk about sex, and ditch your intimacy inhibitions. We know of a good scented candle that can help with that.
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Streams or ships?
Stream! It won’t get your energy bill any cheaper, so you better find out now how to generate your own power and electricity during the cold winter months. Who knows, you might light up the whole street with it.
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Our judgment?
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‘Sex, Love & Goop’ can be seen in its entirety on Netflix.
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Time left? Read our other reviews here.
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