‘The Goop Lab’ Episode 3 ‘The Pleasure is Ours’ affirms body-positivity, sensuality and importance of orgasms

Episode 3 of ‘The Goop Lab’, Netflix’s documentary series on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand Goop, and what goes around inside the $250 million company, moves the focus from questionable esotericism to something more real -- the female orgasm. Titled ‘The Pleasure is Ours’, this episode was about developing a healthy, positive relationship with one’s body.

The very beginning of the episode suggests that Gwyneth needs to keep up with other Netflix originals like ‘Sex Education’ and ‘Big Mouth’, seeing that she seemed to not know the difference between a vagina and a vulva. But moving past that, it turned out to be an interesting episode. 

It featured Betty Dodson, an American sex educator, one of the pioneers of sex-positive feminism. Dodson runs workshops that teach body-positivity, acceptance and not feeling shame about one’s sexuality. 

They discussed the slew of cultural practices -- slangs for female genitalia, pornography -- that had given rise to body and sex-shame, which in turn led to practices like labiaplasty (a surgical procedure done to reshape a woman's labia minora). She spoke about how women are culturally taught to hate their own genitalia and how one could get around this idea. 

The episode also featured Isabella Frappier, sexuality and women’s health writer, podcaster, tarot reader, psychic medium, and “Sexuality Doula”. Engaging with Goop employees, she discussed what their biggest challenges were in the realm of sexuality, body, self, and sex-shame.

Frappier did a photoshoot of the women, letting them exhibit how they felt sensual, thus creating a wholesome space for them to express themselves sans the male gaze and sans any kind of external pressure. The outcome was the employees exploring their sexual relationships with their own bodies. 

Ultimately, they go to the part of the big “O”. Frappier, in a conversation with the Goop women, explained the kind of conversations one needed to have to be able to guarantee their own pleasure. She spoke about the culture of “faking it” and how it only proves to be bad in the long run and how one could discover, on their own and with their partners, what worked for them. She did a massage exercise with the women, teaching them how to communicate better. They could later use this same model with their partners to experience better pleasure.

Speaking about the need to, and the advantage of knowing how to pleasure oneself, about how to be one with the body, Dodson said, “We’re very dangerous when we are knowledgeable.”

‘The Goop Lab’ is available for viewing on Netflix.