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Carlin Ross spreads her legs and moves the lamp deeper between her thighs.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” a voice just over her shoulder says.
“It is,” Ross agrees, staring at herself in a mirror, transfixed. She drops her hands, delicately, smoothing them over the outline of her vulva.
For just $12.99 a month, you can join the millions of people who’ve watched Ross touch herself on camera whenever you want. But if you’ve devoured Love Is Blind or Tiger King, you’ve already shelled out for Ross’s show-and-tell. She’s on Netflix.
Carlin Ross is the woman who was filmed having an orgasm on The Goop Lab, Netflix’s TV show with Gwyneth Paltrow about her lifestyle empire, Goop. Ross and her coconspirator, the famed 90-year-old sex educator Betty Dodson, school Paltrow and her Goop employees on human biology, sexism, and self-doubt, and then Ross demonstrates as Dodson coaches her to an orgasm, using a special technique. The camera crew—and anyone who has a Netflix password—has full permission to look on.
How did a fast-talking New Jersey mom who was raised a Christian fundamentalist wind up teaching Gwyneth Paltrow the difference between a vulva and vagina? How did a former property lawyer help Goop—a women’s lifestyle brand famous for dubious claims about women’s genitals—create a revolutionary piece of sex education? What was she doing last month at a Walgreens in suburban Jersey ringing up a carton of cigarettes, a packet of condoms, and a box of hearing aids?
Ross is a nice lady from the suburbs who has a serious sweater collection, a kid, and a dog. Still, the answer to all of these questions is that she does what she wants and doesn’t take any shit. (Also, the condoms were for sex toys that she hands out during workshops; the cigarettes and hearing aids were for Dodson, who has taken to smoking and drinking Champagne in her 90s.)
Ross spits facts and talks about sex education like a rapper—because she can and because she feels she has to.
“I really believe that not telling young women about their bodies or giving them access to health care is systematic abuse at the level of genocide,” Ross says, a few minutes into our interview.
“You have to love your body to have an orgasm,” she says. “You have to feel entitled. The most unattractive man in the world still feels entitled to an orgasm. But women, we always feel like, ‘Maybe if I’m skinnier?’”
And: “If you’ve had an orgasm, you’re not a virgin.”
And: “Sexual freedom for women is a life goal, my reason for being.”
And on the controversies surrounding Goop: “There are so many controversies out there; it just seemed like a pimple on the ass of controversy.”
She has to be this succinct. In her decades as a sex educator, she has answered thousands of questions on her and Dodson’s site. “There are only really 10 to 15 questions, and they all boil down to the same thing,” Ross says. “‘Am I normal?’”
Rest easy—the answer is yes.
Ross grew up on the South Shore of Long Island with religious Christian parents who didn’t believe in TV, but did believe in a somewhat radical message of body acceptance—though raised almost a half-century apart, both Ross and Dodson credit their openness around sex in part to their parents walking around their homes naked. It was an abstinence-only education, but one that also involved her mother calmly explaining that the purpose of the clitoris is for sexual pleasure. It was a loving, “Amish-lite” life. And then she went through puberty.
“When you’re a girl, right, everyone listens to you in your family, and your family friends, everyone is nice to you,” Ross says. “And then you get your breasts, and all of a sudden your standing changes, and you become something else. You’re supposed to regulate male sexuality, and your dad’s friends are saying fresh things to you, and groping on mass transit happens.”
