Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop drops into my inbox every Friday. I look forward to it. I’m often tired, because it’s the end of the week. Sometimes hungover, because Thursday night comes before Friday morning. And every second Friday (due to my fortnightly pay cycle) I’m usually broke. It’s precisely the time I want to read about lentil broth detoxes and organic vegetable smoothies, and kitting out the beach house I don’t own.

Goop tempts me with a taste of the life I could live if I stopped living the life I currently live – which is messy, poor, and filled with meals made from industrial meat. In short, Paltrow gives me something to aim towards.

According to her website, “Goop has become a place for GP [that’s Gwyneth Paltrow] to introduce some of the incredible experts who have mentored her throughout her life to a wider audience, and a place where readers can find suggestions about where to shop, eat, and stay from a trusted friend.”

This type of content curation is akin to a public service, yet the takedowns of Paltrow are growing increasingly harsh, even though the tone of Goop is positive, encouraging and free of snark.

Journalist Chris Ayres, high up in his recent Sunday Times profile of Paltrow, recounted that in Paltrow’s teenage years, her father caught her smoking. His reaction, aside from discarding the pack, was to arrange for Madonna to write a letter to the then-12 year old, with the post-script “Good girls live longer”.

This episode, Ayres wrote, shows the “unfettered access and privilege enjoyed by Paltrow, now 42, during her life as a Hollywood heiress, Oscar-winning actress, rock-star wife – and, most recently, ­“conscious uncoupler” and purveyor of Goop, a strange and much-ridiculed lifestyle brand ...”

Dude: name a Hollywood star who isn’t privileged!

The article went on to attack her “sub-orbitally high standards” in both boyfriends and choosing film roles, before laying into Goop, “which causes near-daily bouts of mockery for its cluelessly overpriced recipe suggestions (for example, a dessert called “Sex Bark”, which requires $138 worth of ingredients), and dubious medical advice”.

“It is hard to think of a celebrity who has managed to irritate more people over a more extended period of time than Paltrow,” Ayres wrote.

Illustrating the article was a photoshopped picture of Paltrow with slime being thrown towards her, and another with slime dripping down her face: the digital equivalent of being thrown in the stocks to have crowds pelt you with rotten tomatoes.

And in the Guardian last week, Paltrow was teased for saying she was “incredibly close to the common woman”.

Some of the Goop content is irrelevant to me: I live a thousand kilometres away from the Hamptons, which is referenced constantly as if it were some sort of last word in decadent cool but actually looks boring and cold. The vaginal steaming that Paltrow champions scares me, because I once got a steam burn on my hand from cling wrap in the microwave – and I imagine it would hurt even worse in the vagina.

Then there’s the fantasy stuff: the $2,000 throw rugs, the leather bags soft as baby’s skin, and the cool taco truck you can stumble across if you live in somewhere called “Koreatown” in LA. The ponies, the yachts that float around the Indonesian archipelago staffed with macrobiotic chefs, the trainers whose sole purpose in life is to make sure that your butt has a shapely shape – of course it’s a fantasy, a kind of glossy, harmless consumer porn that lets us admire, then discard, beautiful objects without paying the price.

There’s other stuff in there as well. It’s advice on relationships, and friendship and health – advice on how to live. In our secular age we flounder around, trying to construct rules on how to live. Paltrow may be just the latest guru to try to fill that void, with her essays on “selfish selfishlessness”, but at least she’s frank about it – and you the reader are free to take it, or leave it.

After all, Paltrow isn’t in government making vaginal steaming or 21 day detoxes mandatory. She’s just a girl, standing in front of the internet, asking us to love her.

Yet women love to hate her. It may be easier to defend Robert Mugabe at any average lunch with friends than to raise a voice in favour of Gwyneth Paltrow.

“She makes women feel bad about themselves,” one friend said to me recently. “It’s hard enough just working and looking after kids, but she says ‘Buy these $1,000 shoes, and holiday here, and eat all this stuff that takes ages to prepare.’ It makes you feel bad about your life.”

But to me, Paltrow is like Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: someone who is not of this world, who is ethereal, above it all. That’s why I like her. She’s a fantasy who lives in a life far different from my own, but through her newsletter I can dip into it – if only for 10 minutes every Friday.

What’s the harm in this? When am I going to get time to source the kind of relationship advice I get from Goop? How would I have heard from the likes of Cynthia Bourgeault – an Episcopal priest and mystic – without Paltrow? Or discover that I can actually grow taller if I work on something called my fascia from someone called a structural integrative specialist?

Underneath the criticism of Paltrow’s advice is the implication that we should only accept wisdom from the broken, those brought low and the ones who have endured hard trials. With her peppy take on her marriage breakdown (“conscious uncoupling” and all that) she doesn’t fit the narrative. But the envy and spite she inspires is our problem – not hers.