Goop’s Pleasure Principle: Sister Spread Eagle Teaches Elvis Pelvis
By: Gfc, Grown Folk Conversations
Tags: Sexuality, Goop, Womens Health, Sex Education, Black Women

I had my own reality check and Elvis pelvis moments in college. Now, I too once thought, I knew “how to move” until my Jamaican friends tried to teach me how to whine and make a change with my hips. I picked up a few tips and tricks from them and my Guyanese friend’s Kwe Kwe. In both cultures, the girls said they’ve danced that way since they were children. When they learned it wasn’t about sex, but dancing and moving their bodies to the rhythm — as they got older it became a source of pride, power, and control of their bodies.

In college, I also fell in love with African dance. When I took classes, I felt a connection between my culture and body that wasn’t sexual — my body just naturally moves to the drum and beat.

So Goop staff, Miss Betty, and the 7,000 women she’s claimed to have helped please watch this woman move and tell me you still think Miss Betty really invented rocking the female pelvis.

Courtesy of TikTok and Youtube

Or if you’d like to learn how to wine or whine — here is a tutorial.

Video Courtesy of Youtube

Deep Dark History

Now that we’ve had a lesson and correction in revisionist history. I will admit that I can still appreciate Goop and Betty’s message of supporting and empowering women. I feel teaching and nurturing are innate traits. Regardless, I don’t need to get naked, “drop-down and get my eagle on” (Nelly), stare at other women’s vulvas, or play with mine to feel a sense of sisterhood. Perhaps it’s my prudish Christian upbringing peeking through, but some things are just a little too freaky and frankly a bit unsanitary.

On a germy, slightly high school gym class note -I didn’t see anybody in Ms. Betty’s class sitting on towels or anything to protect their booties from dust or cooties.

Sister Spread Eagle’s coochie sharing circle just felt very freaky, hedonistic and frankly, it confused me… While Ms. Betty didn’t invent color blind feminism — she did stay true to a long history of white-washed appropriation by taking bits and pieces of other cultures turning them into perverted profitable rituals. White people have scowled and scorned Black women for simply shaking or moving our hips and butts while they ignore and downplay America’s sick and deviant history with Black women’s bodies and sexuality.

It was African female slaves who were raped and bred like animals to keep a steady supply of free labor that generated billions of dollars, political power, and create generational wealth for white families. This wealth gap is maintained by a racial caste system that continues to devalue and demonize Black women while we deify privileged, white women — like Gwenyth and Miss Betty.

Countless suburban wives, friends, and community members keep dirty and deviant secrets behind closed doors where powerful men prey on vulnerable men, women, and children — like Roman Polanski, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Ed Buck, etc.

When Miss Betty and Goop discussed American women’s history of body-shaming, they forgot about Black and brown women who will never conform to Eurocentric standards of beauty and body type. Nor did they discuss how Black female slaves were tortured and experimented on without anesthesia by the “father of gynecology”, James Marion Sims. Sims can be credited for perpetuating the myth that Black women have a higher tolerance for pain than white women. This sick myth has led to the pain, suffering, and death of millions of Black women who were denied proper medical care and pain management to this day.

Eurocentric Christian culture also shares the blame for the façade of whiteness being the fragile, yet authoritative standard-bearers of morality and all things pure. For example, Goop and Netflix having the privilege and power to literally show “vulvas’’ on the platform without a peep from white suburban moms, protests from conservatives, or puritanical evangelicals or churches.

I guess white “vulvas” and naked bodies are ok for TV, but Lizzo’s twerking her big, black cheeks at a basketball game is “too much for tv”.

Twisted Sisterhood

This episode was amusing and a bit shocking, but I feel that the overall message is important to all women. The presentation and presenter are problematic. Miss Betty’s “Rock and Roll” method like most “cool” things in popular culture — is ancient news to Black and brown people. Moving your pelvis to increase pleasure (and blood flow) is only new to rhythm-less white women or women of color who are so assimilated and engrossed in whiteness or religion that they’re afraid or don’t know how to embrace or their own body’s natural rhythms.

Once again, I fail to understand how no one at Goop challenged the notion that this woman invented and teaches a movement that billions of Black and Brown women naturally do, and to negate this fact this is a form of appropriation and dismissiveness to a whole segment of the world that does not look or move like stiff, rhythm-less white women.

The level of dismissive bias is a common theme in the Goop series. For example in another episode, a white male staffer opted to be coached by another white man — thereby dismissing the men of color who actually had first-hand knowledge of the healing modality. I get it, I too would want to be comforted by someone from my culture, but it’s off-putting to see it considering they were in Jamaica and were engaging in sacred, indigenous healing practices.

Watching this series takes the “pet or threat” theory thing to a whole other extreme because they lack cultural competency and don’t adhere to standard rules of engagement like physical or professional boundaries. We have to face the fact that shows like this are passively racist — which means they don’t exclude Black people, but they’re not going out of their comfort zone to include or engage Black people and indigenous cultures in a thoughtful, respectful, and mutually beneficial way.

It’s the “I’m not rocking the white boat because you’ve been sailing in it for years and as long as you and your people are comfortable — you’re willing to look away while Black and brown people fall overboard and drown in the sea of oppression- as casualties of privilege…”

It reminds me of when my WM boss was asked about diversity. He said, “I’m never going to use a list to checkmark one Black, one Asian, one Latino, etc. to show my dedication to diversity”. At first, I was offended, but after watching this docuseries, I get it! I kind of agree with him. As a Black woman, I don’t want to be a checkmark to fill a diversity void or mandate.

I don’t expect Gwyneth or Goop to have Black, brown and indigenous people just for show. I want her to have another lens and culturally competent perspective at the table that will see her blind spots. I want her to value diversity and empowered her staffers to help her produce content where Black brown and indigenous cultures aren’t appropriated, but are collaborative partners and credited for their contributions and influence -on the show and popular culture.

Thank you for reading.

To further illustrate my point here is a Soca video from the Caribbean and Africa.