The Witches Are Coming

by Lindy West

  The big reason to love Chip and JoJo is for the banter. Regularly, throughout each episode, the action will pause and Chip and JoJo will address the camera about the trials and tribulations on the job site and at their home, which they share with their forty perfect children. They generate charming bloopers. They laugh and tease each other. Sometimes Chip will get a little hornay and honk JoJo’s butt. They are keeping it tight and keeping the spice alive. They are, as the adults trying to sound like the kids say, #relationship #goals—the type of love that none of us deserves. They are ravenously beloved, by me as much as anyone.

  Fixer Upper ended its run in 2018, not out of a lack of public interest in Chip and JoJo but the extravagant opposite. In addition to their brick-and-mortar store, Magnolia Market, they also have a print magazine, The Magnolia Journal ($7.99 an issue), and, a year after the end of Fixer Upper, the couple announced that they would be developing their own entire television network, the Magnolia Network. “The difference moving forward is Jo and I are going to be able to tell more of our life stories,” Chip told USA Today. “And so, as opposed to it being a very narrow vein in our universe, which is obviously construction and design and the things we do for a living, for us we feel like there’s a more holistic story to be told here, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

  The Magnolia Network is scheduled to debut in the summer of 2020, and based on my calculations of their professional trajectory, Chip and JoJo will be … beepboop-beep-beep-beep-boop-boop … fully running the galaxy by 2028. Well, to be more specific, JoJo will be Glorious Milky Way Hegemon of Earth and Void, and Chip will be Intergalactic Minister of Dropping a Space Hammer on His Foot Because He Saw a Centipede.

  But there was a perilous moment, in December 2016, when the prospect of a business venture dedicated to more of the Gaineses’ universe might not have seemed like a wise business move. BuzzFeed published a story that very briefly threatened to upend the Gaines empire, to much handwringing in both the pro-Gaines and Gaines-critical camps.

  BuzzFeed reported that the Gaineses were members of Antioch Community Church, a megachurch whose pastor, BuzzFeed said, described the HGTV stars as “dear friends.” That same pastor, Jimmy Seibert, unfortunately for the Gaineses but more unfortunately for any gay children in his congregation, also disapproves of marriage equality and believes that conversion therapy is a good and reasonable thing to do to LGBTQ children.

  I assume it goes without saying among the readers of this book, but you cannot “convert” people from the essence of their being, and even if you could, you should not, and even if being gay or trans wasn’t the essence of a person’s being, you still should just let that person fucking live how they want to, and the way that many religious organizations do try to “convert” gay kids to being straight is cruel, traumatizing, and painful. Sam Brinton, the director of advocacy at the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ youth, has written about surviving conversion therapy. Brinton, who is gender fluid and uses they/them pronouns, endured a counselor saying that Brinton was an abomination who would get HIV and AIDS. The torture was physical, too:

  The therapist ordered me bound to a table to have ice, heat, and electricity applied to my body. I was forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging, and having sex. I was supposed to associate those images with the pain I was feeling to once and for all turn into a straight boy.

  That kind of treatment—still legal in forty-one American states in 2019!—is what Chip and JoJo’s spiritual leader believes in. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics all call it harmful. According to the BuzzFeed report, in a sermon after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, Seibert preached:

  We can change, contrary to what you hear. I’ve worked with people for over 30 years—I have seen hundreds of people personally change their direction of same-sex attraction from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle. It doesn’t mean they don’t struggle with feelings, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t hurting, it doesn’t mean it’s not challenging. But they have chosen to change. And there has always been grace there for those who choose that.

  Okay, buddy.

  Defenders of Chip and JoJo were fierce in their outrage. How dare BuzzFeed pry into the private lives of such cheery and deadly charismatic celebrities? What about freedom of religion? How is their religious practice any of anyone’s business, and how do we even know they agree with the church’s stance on conversion therapy?

  Twitter was aflame. The Washington Post ran an op-ed titled “BuzzFeed’s Hit Piece on Chip and Joanna Gaines Is Dangerous” (witch hunt!), which argued that attending a homophobic church is fine because lots of people in the United States are homophobic.

  Pastor Seibert, for his part, responded to the controversy in an audio interview with Tony fucking Perkins, of all people, surely to the pure delight and nothing-remotely-approaching-an-aneurysm of Chip and JoJo’s PR team. Perkins, a truly evil quack, is the longtime president of the anti-LGBTQ extremist organization the Family Research Council, who relentlessly pushes the false claim that gay men are more likely to abuse children (pedophilia is “a homosexual problem,” he says), insists that gay rights activism will lead to violence against Christians, and lobbied doggedly against antibullying policies implemented after a spate of LGBT teen suicides. A cool and totally normal guy! I’m sure we all have dear friends of dear friends who say things like this jewel from Perkins’s close associate, the Executive Vice President of the Family Research Council: “[Islam] should not be protected under the First Amendment, particularly given that those following the dictates of the Quran are under an obligation to destroy our Constitution and replace it with sharia law.”

  Thousands of people attend Antioch Church in Waco. It is a megachurch. We have no information as to how often Chip and Joanna actually attend, how seriously they adhere to Antioch’s tenets, what they might have found personally healing or comforting in that spiritual community, whether they actually consider Seibert a “dear friend” or if he was just blowing smoke up his own ass. Two congregants cannot reasonably be expected to repair every moral flaw in their church’s entrenched culture, and it is, perhaps, a slippery slope to consider an HGTV celebrity tainted by way of which virulent bigot to whom their pastor chooses to grant his first post-homophobia-scandal interview. It is certainly arguable that that’s a degree of separation too far. But man, it just sucks. And we should be able to say it sucks without histrionic op-eds calling us “dangerous.”

  Eventually Chip addressed the controversy himself, writing (rather noncommittally):

  Joanna and I have personal convictions. One of them is this: we care about you for the simple fact that you are a person, our neighbor on planet earth. It’s not about what color your skin is, how much money you have in the bank, your political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, nationality or faith …

  We are not about to get in the nasty business of throwing stones at each other—don’t ask us to cause we won’t play that way.

  Come on, man, just disavow that shit! You’re killing us! We love the banter and the buns honking! Do it for the banter, or MAYBE DO IT FOR THE LGBTQ YOUTH SUICIDE RATES.

  Observant viewers pointed out that—despite Chip’s assertions that he and his wife don’t throw stones at all human beings equally—Fixer Upper had not featured a single gay couple in its four seasons on the air, a rarity on an extremely gay network. The show fixed that omission in season five.

  Two days after the BuzzFeed story was published, HGTV released the following statement: “We don’t discriminate against members of the LGBT community in any of our shows. HGTV is proud to have a crystal clear, consistent record of including people from all walks of life in its series.”

  And it worked. The controversy died away. For the general public, that torture-gay-people-until-they’re-straight bombshell did not stick, and—in the usual
way of things—will instead impact only Fixer Upper’s LGBTQ fans and their allies, who now have to think about conversion therapy every time they want to watch the (maybe) deserving citizens of Waco, Texas, obtain slightly nicer sconces.

  There’s an insidious meme format that’s been circulating regularly since the 2016 election. It’s usually a photo of two white people standing, smiling, next to a barbecue grill. Maybe they are wearing sports memorabilia from the same team. Maybe they are sharing Thanksgiving leftovers. The caption usually reads something like “This is Donk. He’s my neighbor. He voted for Trump. I voted for Hillary! That doesn’t stop us from watching the big game together on the game day! Nachos and darts! CONNECTION, not DIVISION, is what is going to save this country!!!!!!!! [AMERICAN FLAG EMOJI BICEPS EMOJI, HEART EMOJI, ONE BIG EYE ONE SMALL EYE DIAGONAL TONGUE EMOJI].”

  Now, it is true that it is good, potentially, to know and respectfully share ideas across cultural and political borders. It is not illegal to have bad, even evil, ideas, nor should it be. But there’s a reason why these memes are almost always made by white people about white people. It is not good or healing or compulsory for marginalized people to connect with those who disagree that they should get to be full human beings under the law. Not everyone has the luxury of detaching from politics for an afternoon to eat a hot dog. And yes, I know this is complicated. I love Chip and JoJo, too.

  Inevitably, in any critical analysis of pop culture like this, there comes a point when one party throws up his or her hands and asks, Why aren’t we allowed to just have fun sometimes? Whatever happened to escapism? It’s just a TV show! Let the people have the TV show!

  And look, I am an escapism queen. I love to have the TV show. But what good is a vacation if certain people are dehumanized and tortured there? That’s going to be a ZERO STARS from me, dog!

  Sidestepping reality—whether you genuinely believe in, say, conversion therapy or just don’t want to deal with some bullshit your pastor got you into—is choosing the lie. This is what I’ll never understand about that tactic: people are dying to forgive you if you just live in the truth.

  Since the 2016 election, conservative celebrities have been complaining that their political views make them unpopular in Hollywood. “Hollywood Conservatives Say More Stars Stay Quiet to Avoid Public Backlash, Being Blacklisted,” read a Fox News headline in 2018. “There used to be more of us,” eighty-four-year-old Pat Boone told The Hollywood Reporter. “Tom Selleck, Jon Voight, Bruce Willis, who were outspoken, but they’ve been browbeaten and ridiculed, which is the main instrument on the left to shut us up.” James Woods is forever whining on Twitter. Tim Allen says that doing comedy right now “is like dancing on the thinnest ice.”

  Well, good! I’m glad this is uncomfortable for you! The partisan divide is not insignificant or cute. Children are dying in ICE custody. In May 2019, twenty-three-year-old Muhlaysia Booker was killed in Dallas (just a ninety-minute drive from Waco), the fifth black trans woman to be murdered that year. It is not, as Chip wrote, “throwing stones at each other” to point out that these things are incompatible with basic morality. There is value in understanding those who disagree with you—some of us want to go wild on the backsplash with a pop of Moroccan tile, and some of us are white subway tile to the bone—but we’re not living in a meme. There is no value in willfully ignoring hatred, and the lie that neutrality in the face of oppression is not a political stance is part of how we got here.

  People are not binary. We are not good or bad, saintly or irredeemable. There’s nothing wrong in asking for accountability and an acknowledgment of shared humanity from the people we admire, the people building the culture our children will grow up in, the people to whom we give our money. Who doesn’t want to be better? What—you want to stay bad or get worse out of spite?

  Every person is, to varying degrees, a fixer upper (SORRY1). Go salvage some shiplap.

  _____________________

  1 JUST KIDDING I’M NOT SORRY AT ALL SUBMIT THIS SENTENCE TO THE PULITZER COMMITTEE.

  Do, Make, Be, Barf

  Culver City, Los Angeles, was socked in by haze, and a line of women in black athleisure—more blondes than one is accustomed to seeing in one place at one time—stretched down the block. Each of us had paid between $500 and $1,500 to stand in this line and attend In Goop Health: Presented by Goop, the inaugural “health and wellness expo” of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand, Goop.

  Paltrow launched Goop as a sort of new-agey newsletter in 2008 and by 2018 had grown the company into a website, a store, a print magazine, a podcast, a Netflix series, and, most important, a brand, all together valued at $250 million. The brand, essentially, is Gwyneth herself—the implicit promise that commerce can transform toads into princesses, that enough kale and Manuka honey can turn my sweaty, dumpy ass into a willow tree. I went to Culver City that hazy day in 2017 to find out.

  People were excited, a little nervous and giddy. It felt as if we were waiting for the bus to summer camp, if your summer camp gave out free lube and Nicole Richie was there. At 9:00 a.m., the beefy security team parted and we poured into a courtyard where employees sorted us based on how much we had paid to be there. Color-coded bracelets indicated whether you were a Lapis ($500), Amethyst ($1,000), or Clear Quartz ($1,500) Gooper. More money meant more activities: a foam roller workout, a “sound bath,” even lunch with “GP” herself in the “Collagen Garden.” A prohibitively expensive, celebrity-studded self-help salon wasn’t exclusive enough; apparently the very rich can’t have fun without a little class hierarchy.

  We passed into a second courtyard, which offered clusters of tasteful white furniture ringed by a variety of “wellness adventures.” In one corner, you could sit cross-legged on a cushion and the “resident Goop shaman” would tell you which crystal you “need.” In the opposite corner was a woman who would photograph your aura in a little tent. There was an oxygen bar. There was an IV drip station. And there was food, of course, just in very small pieces: tiny vegan doughnuts, quinoa and lox swaddled in seaweed, ladles of unsalted bone broth, fruit.

  I took a lap around the courtyard and the cavernous hangar where I would be spending the next nine hours (there was no reentry). Inside, interspersed among the Goop-approved matcha and coconut water stalls, was the Goop Marketplace, where attendees could buy face potions, rolling pins, and Tory Burch’s new line of active-wear. For $55, you could buy one of the jade eggs that Goop famously suggested women carry around in their vaginas. Or a rose quartz egg, if you had “seen results with the jade egg and want to take your practice a step further.” I headed back outside and got in line for the shaman.

  Turned out, the shaman was a little backed up, so they were scheduling appointments instead. A friendly employee wrote my name on a clipboard and told me to come back at 4:05 p.m. The line for aura photography was even longer. I waited about ten minutes before a staffer announced that the schedule was full and we were all fired from the line, but we could check back later. That was fine. Everyone was feeling good. Employees wove through the crowd with trays of probiotic juice. I decided I liked the Goop expo. It was silly, but most of us seemed to be in on the joke—like Dungeons and Dragons for your vaginal flora. Why not make life a little more magical by believing in magic? What’s the harm?

  In Goop Health was not my first foray into the Goop life. When I wrote for Jezebel, I frequently covered (made fun of) Paltrow’s evolution from movie star to lifestyle guru. As part of my research (being a dick), in 2014, I purchased a copy of her diet book It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great and set out to test her promise on myself. What if I spent a week eating only Gwyneth-approved twigs and barleys? Would I look good? Would I feel great?

  The questions I sought to answer during one week in June 2014 were:

  1. Did Gwyneth Paltrow really deserve all the shit I had given her for believing that water has feelings and that duck bacon is a “pantry staple”?

  2. Was
eating vegan and gluten free really the “detoxifying” miracle cure she made it out to be?

  3. Could I even do it?

  4. What the fuck are toxins?

  And 5. Most important, by the end of the week, would I be more ethereal?

  The answers to those questions, in order, were: yes, no, kind of, who fucking knows?, and [floats away on a gossamer wisp].

  Turned out I could do it, but poorly. My Goop food diary went something like this:

  I spent $300 on three days’ worth of groceries.

  Not my fault, really, but JESUS.

  I almost barfed up my wet almonds.

  For my morning snack on the first day, I was supposed to eat “a handful of Soaked Raw Almonds.” Soaking the almonds is very important, says Paltrow:

  Almonds have an enzyme in their coating that makes them difficult to digest. The harder anything is to digest, the more work your body has to do to get to all the nutrients and the more you miss out. Good news though! If you simply soak raw almonds in plenty of water for at least half a day, the enzyme will break down and you’re good to go.

  Something about those almonds was odious to me. I chewed and chewed, but they never seemed to go anywhere—they just circulated around my mouth, breaking into smaller and smaller chunks of nut-flavored eraser. I hated them. The wet almonds kicked off a faint, latent nausea that lingered for the entire week.

  I exploded the blender.