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Notes -
Anyone have thoughts on the Huberman article run by NY Magazine? He apparently was dating 5+ women simultaneously, letting each of them believe he was only dating them, and therefore it would be safe to have unprotected sex.
My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?
On further thought, I wonder if he didn't want to do the poly thing because you'd have to go through the process of electing a #1 girlfriend that you can swap fluids with, and then for girlfriends #2-5 you have to use condoms and that's no fun.
But on even more advanced thought, perhaps this is a signal that poly is actually pretty low status? If an adored sensitive smart hot famous-ish science-y guy can't even be honest about his sexual desires and find suitable partners, again, in the Bay Area (!), that suggests poly has a very, very long road to general acceptance.
He didn’t want to do poly because as the article either states or strongly implies, he wanted to be able to sleep with all the women but for them only to fuck him, hence the two (or six) timing. This ties into him regularly shouting at his girlfriend for having children from a previous relationship:
I wouldn’t date someone who had previous children, but I like to think I’d have the self-awareness not to do it and then rage at them because of something I’d known about for years, while also cheating on them with (at least) five other people.
Most not-absolute-bottom-tier women won’t accept being in an actual harem, even for a moderately successful man (because it’s humiliating and very low status amongst women), and so he ‘had to’ lie to them to get what he wanted.
We can say that the general male preference in romantic relationships runs like:
I can fuck many beautiful women, they can only fuck me (harem)
My wife remains faithful to me, but I can go out and sleep with other women (one-sided poly)
I fuck one beautiful woman, she only fucks me (monogamy)
My girlfriend/wife and I both fuck other people (ie poly/swingers depending on exact nature of relationship)
My wife has more partners than me (eg classic poly cuck scenario)
#3 is the only one that leads to a stable society, at large scale. The others all lead to a war of all against all, where every man is in competition with every other man for a scarce quantity of women. It leads to something like ISIS or the early years of Islam: endless warfare to either kill off the surplus men or acquire more women.
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Zero - I fuck all the women, literally all of them, all 3.5 billion of them.
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Uggg...my biggest issue with him in that article, if it is accurate, is his fur baby behavior. I can't stand it when people treat pets as children and obsesses over them. I consider it a huge red flag as it signifies a lack of awareness and control, and a hijacking of paternal instincts.
*When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”
He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog,*
The fact that the dog features at all shows how weird he must be about it. I mean the article is actually a hit piece, but if it is true and the guy is out there giving HPV to people while lying about it, he sucks. Also seems proud to have "dark triad" characteristics and takes pleasure in deception.
It kind of seems like he made up his origin story out of whole cloth, he lied about his hardships to gain street cred. As the article says. "A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor." Seems like a trend for these bro-science podcasters. If I have to hear about the 3 weeks joe rogan had to use a wheelbarrow one more time.
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Agreed. Sounds like we've settled on: a man of Huberman's status can't organize a harem for himself and have it consist of high-tier women. If you're of Huberman's grade, you have women eager to date you but you need to mislead them about your relationship status if you want your harem.
So... how much more status do you need to actually pull this off? Can Sergey Brin get away with it?
Seems like a cultural issue rather than a status one. Mainstream western culture is horrified by the idea of a harem, even if its consentual. Almost by definition, no high status woman would agree to be in one. But it does seem to work in other cultures where its more normalized, like fundamentalist Islam and Mormons.
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Sergey kind of has it although my impression is it’s with poly people. Eric Schmidt kind of has it, but only by leading on women about having a kid with him apparently. In general the status loss for a high status woman being a concubine is so significant it doesn’t happen often. To some extent if your definition of ‘high tier’ is young fashion models, Adnan Khashoggi had it in his prime, and he was a billionaire in the 70s and 80s when that was very, very rare indeed.
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