Once upon a time,

it was extremely popular to hate on Gwyneth Paltrow, or more specifically, to hate on Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site Goop. If we’re being honest, it was low-hanging fruit. A sometimes unintentionally comical site devoted to quasi food science and expensive unnecessaries for privileged blondes, its seeming total lack of self-awareness pretty much begged to be parodied. As for Gwyneth herself, they hated her for being too earnest and trying too hard. (Anne Hathaway suffers from the same apparently unforgivable sins.) They hated her for being rich and living among the trappings of that wealth, even though Kim Kardashian has made an entire career based off exactly the same thing and no-one accuses her of being elitist. At one point, Gwyneth was even credited with being the world’s most hated celebrity, beating the evil triumvirate of Bieber, Trump and Chris Brown to the top spot. All that vitriol because of an e-newsletter filled with activated-almond recipes and cashmere crew-necks... Can we really be that strongly attached to gluten?

Personally, I’ve always loved Gwyneth and Goop – although I didn’t always love what I suspected that said about me. When the media lambasted GP for those so easily mockable quotes, I felt like I could hear the tone in which she meant them and I’m fairly sure she might actually be really funny IRL. I speak like that, too. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever said I’d rather die than feed my children Cup-a-soup, but it sounds like something I might say to make my point in the moment. I definitely declare that “I can’t live without” things way more random than Vegenaise all the time – I’m just lucky no-one reports and repeats my flippant comments to the point where they become part of my personal canon the way they do with GP. When the father of my two eldest children and I broke up, we tried hard to remain friends and in each other’s lives, too, we just weren’t clever enough to give it a name like “conscious uncoupling” (we just called it “trying to not be assholes”). Goop’s city guides are my first port of call when I travel anywhere, Gwyneth’s turkey meatballs are a regular on my dining table and, you know what, I think I’d actually really like to try steaming my vagina; it sounds... soothing. Also, if Jay Z was my friend, damn right I’d name-drop him all the time.

I don’t care that she occasionally seems out of touch and unrelatable, as she’s so often accused of. Why do we need our celebrities to be relatable anyway? I want them to be eccentric and larger than life, otherwise they’re just your next-door neighbours with a private jet (annoying). Asking Gwyneth to be more in touch with the average human experience is asking her to be someone else completely – she’s the multimillionaire, Oscar-winningactress daughter of famous parents who was once engaged to Brad Pitt, whose ex-husband is the lead singer of Coldplay, and who invented the lifestyle site that turned the entire world on to kale. She’s not average. And we don’t need her to be – we need her to be all those things and have access to all the crazy new stuff we’re curious to know about but don’t have access to ourselves. We need her to make one movie a year that pays her so well that the rest of the time she can hang around at home finding new things to do with sauerkraut. I love her for that, and for putting herself out there. I love her for being generous and not keeping all those experts and weird ideas and knowledge to herself, and for persisting with something she’s passionate about even when it made people not like her. In short, I love Gwyneth. I think she’d make a great girlfriend.

I’m so thrilled that it finally feels like the time for Goop-bashing is over (see our cover story on p54), but it doesn’t sound like GP ever cared anyway. And that’s exactly the kind of woman we love.