Why In Defense of Gwyneth?

I get why people hate Gwyneth Paltrow: She's beautiful, tall, lithe and privileged.

Given all these things, I kinda hate her, too, but it's not a true hatred; it's absolute jealousy because I am none of those things. So despite it all, I really love Gwyneth, and at the risk of sounding like some half-witted fan girl, I don't get all the hate.

I attended a roundtable with Gwyneth once, for the forgettable Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Now granted she was in a room full of press, but she was very gracious and answered each question thoughtfully. She had recently given birth to Apple and clearly missed her daughter, who she told us was just one floor above us in the hotel we were in just off Central Park South.

When you meet her in person—free of TV-interview snippets that aren't always presented in context—it's clear that Gwyneth has a very dry sense of humor, one I don't think translates well into print. Which is why whenever she talks, people listen (or read), and then they misconstrue.

Take the very idea of GOOP for instance. Paltrow says she launched the site "because I felt like I had a lot of really useful information that I was privileged enough to get, because I have this amazing super, fortunate life," which, fine, comes across as a bit pretentious at first glance, but isn't it also categorically true?

She does lead an "amazing, super, fortunate life" that has allowed her to try things like cupping and do things like travel through Spain in a Mercedes convertible. And because she's decided to extol the benefits of alternative medicine and share her favorite Spanish restaurants with us in a "harmless newsletter that goes out each week," (Gwynnie's own words) she's labeled as "just another frantic entrepreneur hoping to find something to sell," as Virginia Heffernan claimed in a blog post titled, "Leave Us Alone, Gwyneth Paltrow."

Sorry Virginia, but not everyone shares those sentiments.

That's why we started In Defense of Gwyneth. Because it's not Gwyneth who needs to leave people alone, it's people who need to leave Gwyneth alone.