Why Does Everyone Hate Gwyneth Paltrow?

Reflections on Women We Love to Hate

We all love to hate certain women. You know exactly what I’m talking about — the women who seem to be effortlessly cool, or rich, or able to embrace their sexuality — or at least market it and cash out on their curves. They have the infuriating and intoxicating je ne se quoi that we all wish that we could muster. We see them drinking their celery juice or their organic rosé and we seeth, mostly from jealousy, but we pretend it is disgust. We mock their salads and avocado toast and the way they smile all the time. We wish that we could smile all the time too, but the rent is due and we have a huge pimple on our chin, and we have a hangover from the cheap bottom-shelf bottle of wine we drank alone last night.

We reluctantly love these well-manicured women who seem to be both boss lady and ingénue. And all the while we hate them for their vacuous and perfectly curated lives — the lives that they seem to live through some sort of cool-girl Instagram filter. What we really want from such women is for them to show themselves as equally human and flawed as we are, yet regardless of how hard they try, we deny them their humanity.

In her book, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why, Sady Doyle dissects the trope of the female in the limelight — the…