One Thing We Need to Learn
A few notes on what the Andrew Huberman piece in New York Magazine can tell us about ourselves.
Hi friends. Short newsletter this week, as this was not what I was intending to send, but I wanted to point out a significant underlying dynamic in the Andrew Huberman piece in New York Magazine. I think we can learn a lot from this pattern in real time—and start to break it.
For those who missed it, Kerry Howley wrote a piece about five women who all believed themselves to be in long-term, monogamous relationships with Andrew Huberman—they were having unprotected sex with him, one was attempting to get pregnant with him via IVF, etc. There are other components to the story as well, but it’s a portrait of someone involved in profound deception and what could be described as emotionally abusive behavior—and this person has put himself at the center of a brand where he dispenses advice to millions of people about how to live. (I made a video about this here.)
As some of you may remember, a month ago, I wrote a series of posts about the dominance of popular male podcasters in the wellness space who don’t platform or interview women (despite the fact that women are handily out-earning men in bio-medical PhDs). This series (“Ending the Manel”) included Huberman as his rates of platforming women are abysmally low—in his podcast’s history, he had interviewed 12 women (8%); since I published the piece, that number climbed to 13*. It also went on to explore the way these men platform and build each other up (“The Perception [and Reality] of Scarcity”), the way they presume expertise in all things “Science” in a way that women are not allowed to do (“Who Gets to Be an Expert?”), and finally, why reputational harm is so dangerous for women (we assassinate women for “bad” behavior) while we don’t care how depraved men are so long as we perceive them as powerful (“The Achilles Heel of Women”).
*In my comments I’m hearing from women—who probably don’t know this stat—that he’s had “many,” “plenty of,” and “women,” citing a woman that they remember hearing on his show. Our sense that this is normal is deep.
I had no idea that this New York Magazine story was coming. I’m not saying that I’m psychic, but I’m not saying that I’m not not psychic.
I really don’t care about Andrew Huberman. I hope he gets the help he needs. So let’s do our best to take him, and the specifics of his story, out of this so we can look at the underlying dynamic, which is much bigger than all of us. I am fascinated by what this story reveals about the patterns of our own thinking as women, and how this plays out in culture, again and again. We can’t change these patterns until we see how they inform our own behavior, specifically our own internalized patriarchy. The series I wrote is about these men, sure, but it’s really about us, and our receptivity to and protection of a world that continues to shut us out of the conversation and/or side line our expertise. Our willingness to participate in this and perpetuate/protect this power is not conscious—it’s hard to see and harder to admit.
This is what I’m seeing play out real-time—and this is what we need to address.
It’s clear that Andrew Huberman is a central figure in many people’s lives and that he dispenses advice they find invaluable. I can see that this piece in New York Magazine hits something deep in those who love and admire him. This is where we go off the rails and where we need to understand what’s happening.
The central question here is whether and where the personal and the professional overlap, and whether it’s okay to continue to revere someone’s intelligence and work who would appear to lack integrity, have questionable morals, and treat women terribly. The threat to the nervous systems of his fan base, whether they recognize it or not, is whether they are then complicit in his bad behavior by continuing to support him.
Nobody wants to feel bad. It feels terrible to feel bad. It’s deeply uncomfortable. And so the instinct is to take this bad feeling and assign it to the people who are making this bad feeling happen. It’s simple! In this case, the commenters are focused on the writer (Kerry Howley) and the ex-girlfriends. These women are being made bad so that Huberman—and by extension his listeners—can be the good guys. The Drama Triangle is all over this: The writer and ex-girlfriends are the Villains, Andrew Huberman is the Victim, and his fans and supporters are the Heroes, rushing in to save/rescue/fix/shield him. (I have an in-depth podcast coming soon about the Drama Triangle as it gets more complex and fascinating than this.)
We are not good at processing our own emotions. We are much better at suppressing and repressing them and then projecting them onto whomever makes us feel bad. It becomes their fault that we feel unsettled. (See: “The Scapegoat”) And women are particularly susceptible to this type of reputational harm. “Bad” men get a pass; “bad” women get destroyed.
This is what it would/could look like to have an emotionally literate response to this if you’re a conflicted fan. There are other paths in this choose-your-own-adventure, but the healthy avenues are ones where you own and deal with your own feelings rather than taking to the keyboard. Here are a few:
Oy. I’m not comfortable supporting someone with my time and attention who treats women in this way. I’m out.
Ooph, this is really disappointing, but when I weigh this against the value of the information I get from him, I’ll stick around. I’m going to manage my ambivalence.
I don’t care, this feels irrelevant.
Etc.
Pick your path. Contend with your own feelings. But don’t deprecate or devalue the women in order to justify your decision to keep engaging with him. Take some deep breaths and sit with yourself first. Question your need to defend yourself and/or him by attacking the women and making them bad. (It’s worth it, I promise, you’ll learn a lot.)
There are some nasty words leveled at the writer (“It must feel very dirty to have written something like this,” was the most recent comment when I looked a few days ago, no need to look for yourself, it’s vile!), but a majority of it is leveled at his ex-girlfriends. It’s awful. Obviously, for many of the commenters, these women are the real villains, because they have so much to gain by baring their humiliation and pain to the world. Why do we always get this so, so wrong?
As a sidenote, it’s alarming to see commenters dismiss these women as gullible idiots. They should get involved with a person with NPD and report back to the rest of us about what it feels like to have your sense of self shredded. I’ve also had an experience with a malignant narcissist, how much he toyed with me, and the intervention my parents and best friend staged to (eventually) get me to see how I was disappearing. (Incidentally, like “Sarah” in the piece, he also gave me HPV.) It happens to a lot of us—I would have never counted myself as someone who could be taken out at the knees. Also worth noting that we have a culture-wide susceptibility for falling for people with NPD: You could say that we’re all in the grips of people with Dark Triad tendencies as they are all over social media.
Before I go, I also want to point out that there’s also no need to defend Andrew Huberman because he will be completely fine. There will be no long-term repercussions for him. He probably won’t even acknowledge that this is happening, though I wish he would—honestly and directly. His fan base will not desert him. People will move on. There might be some advertiser pullback, but I doubt it, particularly if he maintains his place on the top of the charts—he will continue to become very rich from his podcast.
The only ding I can see him suffering is in the quality of his guests: I’ll be curious to see whether the same caliber of scientists, doctors, and psychiatrists will associate with him as it will seem like they are condoning his treatment of these women by appearing alongside him. If they do “use” his platform, that’s how they will justify it to themselves: That they’re using his platform for good, that they’re dispensing great information, and if it’s not them, it will be someone dispensing information of lesser quality. We’re all familiar with this type of mental gymnastics. I understand it, it’s hard to judge it.
Point is, Andrew Huberman, and men like Andrew Huberman, have a ton of power—he can send a book to the New York Times bestseller list, he bends the ears of millions of people every week for many hours. The power of these men does not fade with reputational harm. In some ways, reputational harm only makes them more invincible—because the assumption is that people want to “take him down,” he therefore must be defended and protected. It makes me sad when women volunteer for this job, and use their own femininity as a shield to protect an sanitize men like this, men who really do not need it. I guess I wish people showed up in the same way for women. We could learn a lot from the Swifties, as they are the only example I’ve seen of people defending a woman to the death. People think twice before attacking Taylor Swift.
We’ve seen this movie before. Another meta thing that happened this week: Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir, One Way Back, is out. I wrote about her testimony in On Our Best Behavior in the chapter on Anger, but it relates to what is happening here as well. I’m excited to read it.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
3/21: Breaking family patterns with Vienna Pharaon
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
3/14: The upsides of menopause with Lisa Mosconi, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
3/7: On the scientific and the spiritual with Jeffrey Kripal, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/29: Five things I’ve been thinking about (Solo Episode)
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/22: The basics of Spiral Dynamics with Nicole Churchill
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/15: On being “Basic” with Kate Kennedy
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/8: On maintaining sexual desire with Emily Nagoski PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/1: On the essential nature of relational conflict with John & Julie Gottman, PhDs
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
THE LATEST POSTS:
You Have to Start Where You Are
Synchronicity and Fate: Signs are Signs, but they Still Require Discernment
PART 4: The Achilles Heel of Women
PART 3: Who Gets to Be an Expert?
PART 2: The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity
PART 1: Ending the “Manel”—Doing this Requires Understanding Ourselves
My Baby-Thin Skin: The Shame of “Disappointing” People and Our Doubled Selves
What Size Are Your Shoes? And More Pointedly, is Your Life Governed by Fear?
If You Build It, They Will Come: Maybe?
Entering the Wilderness: Embracing All that’s Not Human
Accepting Responsibility: Growing Up is Hard
What Motivates Change? Hint: Not Harshness, and Likely Not Fear
Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
thank you, Elise, especially for this. "Pick your path. Contend with your own feelings. But don’t deprecate or devalue the women in order to justify your decision to keep engaging with him. "
I was riveted by this article, mostly because it reflects what is happening in the collective field. I don’t play on social media (outside of Substack, which I consider something different entirely) but I did feel the need to post a comment on the Intelligencer site:
I can’t help but wonder: how conditioned are we, as women, by the patriarchy that we shame the women victims and debase the journalist who is trying to save us from ourselves? Yes, I am flawed, he is flawed, we are all flawed, but that’s very different from asking ourselves why we’d ever want someone, especially a man who professes to have all the answers about lasting change, tell us how to live our own life. Woman have listened to men—prophets, politicians, experts, corporate leaders—for so long, we’ve forgotten how to think and feel for ourselves. For anyone who’s done any real internal work, you know this piece isn’t about Huberman; it’s about a culture-gone-mad where immorality, a lack of integrity and manipulation are okay, as long as I get something I want and don’t have to look directly into the eyes of those who get hurt.