Number of the Day

by Shaker BrianWS, who may or may not become a full-time contributor someday based on a variety of circumstances and considerations and planetary alignments, which is sooooo myseterious and let's all enjoy the mystery!

$20,000: The amount of pocket change you'll need to follow Gwyneth Paltrow's awesome recommendations for an "authentic" trip around New York City, via her new iPhone app, "City Guides by goop."

Yeah.

Now there's an on-the-go companion to her regular goop newsletter, equally steeped in privilege, aspirational consumerism, and body policing, but with the added bonus of reminding you that you're poor while you're standing directly outside the window of a shop featuring goop-approved wares that you cannot afford to buy!

It's City Guides by goop: New York Edition. ("London, Los Angeles....and many more" coming soon!) From the app's description:

Built off the success of Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle website, goop.com, this app is the first of a series of goop City Guides, bringing you an in-depth and authentic guide to New York City. Taking the site's popular series of "GO" newsletters to the next level, this city guide sends you to even more of goop's much-loved and often undiscovered spots. This is goop's take on New York. goop finds you the ultimate nail salon, the most fantastic food cart for a quick snack, the best boutique to find a unique piece for your wardrobe, a beautiful salon where you can get your makeup done, the coolest playground to take your kids to, and the person to call for an at-home blow dry. A resource for first-time visitors and city dwellers alike, the app is filled with all the new and under the radar places that goop has discovered over the years. This is the city as you'd never known it before.

Starting with the fact that "undiscovered" tends to mean great, affordable, neighborhood holes-in-the-wall that local people regularly enjoy but aren't "discovered" until A Person of Importance broadcasts their existence via, say, their pretentious iPhone app, this is just an amazing display of privilege and classism.

"A resource for first-time visitors and city dwellers alike," this new app gives you a new, easy way out for all of those times when you're sitting at home thinking about taking a shower and then making Red King Crab for dinner, but realizing there just aren't enough hours in the day to blow dry your own hair and still make it to the local fishmonger before closing.

Of course, as we know from past editions, you're already a fool if you're not having your favorite fishmonger make deliveries to your home, no doy. But let's say you're just now catching up with goop's lifestyle suggestions and you're still stuck retrieving your own fish, at least now you can save time by calling someone to come over and blow dry your hair for you.

I do understand that a ton of time goes into doing hair for red carpet events where hundreds of photographs will be taken of her, and the least-flattering ones used to drag her down, and I also understand that not everyone is physically able to blow dry hir own hair. But this isn't an app designed for famous actresses, or people with disabilities; it's an app designed ostensibly for a general audience.

And that's the problem: Paltrow offers this app as a resource for tourists and residents, without any caveat that many of the residents of New York City—like those quirky characters who frequent "undiscovered" establishments—are impoverished. As Liss observed when we were talking about this: "There's a long and unfortunate history of treating 'Manhattan' and 'New York City' as synonymous entities, which is not merely a clueless expression of profound privilege and wealth, but a perpetuation of that ugly history which disappears entire boroughs of people, many of whom are poor, many of whom are people of color, and many of whose 'classic New Yorkery'—their accents, their culture—are used to deny them access to the halls of power in the city that trades on their 'colorfulness'."

I don't begrudge Gwyneth Paltrow (or Mitt Romney, or anyone with a shitload of money, regardless of how they wound up with it) their right to go spend that money in whatever manner they see fit, as long as it's legal and consensual. But I do have a problem with someone who is as privileged as Paltrow disappearing the real-life struggles of people who don't have her money and means, without so much as a nod to the classes for whom her app is really applicable. The result is the implication that we could just all eat better, shop better, and live better if we did it a bit more like her.

Yep, Paltrow shares her tips with us because her life is so perfect and she wants ours to be better. And of course, her life is so amazing because she simply discovered the time-saving, smart-shopping, golden secrets to life. It's definitely not because she's white, able-bodied, famous, conventionally beautiful, straight, cisgender, and totally fucking rich. Nope, it's definitely that the rest of us are just too lazy or stupid to get with the program.

Same old story. Rinse and repeat. Now call for a blow dry.