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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.
I've got a good quantity of thoughts on it, in that I've listened to a ton of Huberman stuff, bought supplements from Momentous, etc. and was sent the article by a ton of friends.
-- DeBoer wrote on it. He commented that the article feels five years out of date, in that it presents itself as a hit piece but fails to deliver the goods. At the height of #metoo it might have hurt Huberman's business, and tbh I'm considering downloading some episodes in case content disappears, but post Tara Reid it mostly gets a yawn except among fans and the bitter-end-feminists
-- This is a case where understanding Sexual Market Value and basic economics makes things a lot clearer. I mostly agree with @2rafa (as usual) on the normal ranking of male relationship states, though it needs a 6 or a 4.5 depending on the man: Never getting laid at all. What we're seeing here is largely Hubes in his 40s going from "Kinda lumpy looking Stanford professor" to "moderate internet celebrity" and that changed his dating options. He went from a guy who could get a normie girl at a 4 or a 3 on @2rafa's scale, to a guy who could get multiple internet hotties to work toward a 2 or a 1. I've never experienced anything like Huberman's level of celebrity, but his behavior largely mirrors at a larger scale my brief fuckboi phase at 18-19, when I realized that girls might actually want to sleep with me. There's a mix of suddenly feeling like a kid in a candy store, and a scarcity poverty mindset of feeling like you need to warehouse as many of these girls as you can because surely they're going to reject you any second now, a sort of sexual imposter syndrome where you can't let go of your old assessment of yourself. I've noticed this with a lot of men over my life, when they suddenly get rich or lose the weight or otherwise experience a glow-up. They fuck around, because they have the option to do so, and because it is novel and fun, and because they feel like the opportunity is fleeting.
-- This all clearly relates back to @Walterodim's post in the main thread about the urge to label fitness as fascist. They keep trying to hint darkly at Huberman's pipeline of "optimizers" and their weird habits. Given, I have a meathead tendency to want to know the bench press of everyone complaining about him, I really do think a lot of hatred towards Hubes and his Optimizers is simple jealousy. Fat out of shape slobs want the guys who wake up at 430am, meditate, lift weights, and take a cold shower to be losers for some other reason. Because to accept that Huberman is just doing things better than you are is a deep psychic injury, his actions must be evil for some unseen reason.
-- It's amazing how weaksauce their accusations of Charlatan-ry against Hubes are. Athletic Greens probably isn't as good as they say it is, but it isn't harmful either. And they didn't even touch Momentous in any detail, probably because they couldn't come up with anything. They couldn't point to any of his content that was really harmful. Either they didn't do any research, or he really is that whistle-clean. I do think that Huberman's podcast suffers from needing to put out content, though less so than most fitness influencers, with a constant stream of things you should be doing. Huberman, at least by his own account, actually does follow too many confusing protocols, claiming for example that he saunas regularly but puts an ice pack in his shorts to keep his balls chilly, which is just colossal levels of weird. Any given episode may be great, but trying to do it all at once will end in nonsense for most people.
-- There's this weird strain of thought among some extremely online femcels that a man who talks with emotional competence is actually a crypto-abuser using therapy-talk to manipulate women. I noticed this a lot on podcasts for the current season of The Bachelor, with Joey being regarded skeptically for trying to listen to girls play their Personal Trauma Cards and gas them up about how strong they are, with some women praising him and others engaging in Backlash because he's surely secretly evil. And for the most part I think what we're seeing with both Joey and Hubes is: they were being a good boyfriend, but they didn't pick you and that's upsetting because they were a good boyfriend. I got the feeling from the little we heard from these women that they would have been perfectly happy with Hubes if he had picked them.
-- Everybody, if you don't want shit like this to happen, don't commit and don't expect commitment until you get married, or at the very least are on a glide path to a definite date of marriage. Don't move in with a boy/girl-friend, for Christ's sake don't do IVF without a ring. If you like it than you should have (made him) put a ring on it. I have very limited sympathy for "cheating" in an LTR that seems to have no plans for marriage. You get what you put up with.
This does definitely sound like the mirror image of the old nice guy meme about men who get mad when they're rejected.
As it turns out, it's pretty ego-busting to be rejected, especially by someone you really like, and think might be a great match for you. It hurts. A lot. I've been there. And it's very easy to turn immediately to the ego-defense mechanism of denial: "I never liked them in the first place." I'm sorry to say that long in my past, I was there too.
I wish we all could just get along, cooperate, be kind to one another, and derive gains from trade. But I'm disappointed in how sorrow so often leads to bitterness, and bitterness to hatred. I'm reminded of that surprisingly pithy Yoda quote: "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."
I'm going to disagree with you that Huberman did nothing wrong. I have a strong distaste for infidelity, especially at this scale. I suppose that comes from just good-faith disagreements we might have over relationship structure. And I don't think this is jealousy. Believe me or not, I'm not all that jealous of someone who chooses not to settle down -- ultimately I prefer monogamy and I see in it a lot of profound benefits that, especially as I've considered it in recent months, far outweigh whatever benefit comes from the alternative. And with the specifics of this case, to hide so much of his life from intimate partners just doesn't sound all that appealing to me -- but hey, I really like deep pillow talk!
Sometimes I worry discussions about dating ignore the diversity of considered preferences that exist out there in the world. I'm a man who, for the balance of my life, has preferred and pursued monogamy as a major life goal. There have certainly been moments where I've doubted that preference (as avid readers may recall), but I've always come back to my strong view that being interpersonally intimate with an exclusive partner is profoundly meaningful, one of the most meaningful things we have on this earth. For me, things like sexual market value and dating strategies are means to the end that is a loving relationship. I think this kind of true relationship becomes more than the sum of its parts, where sex and commitment bring forth not only children but the intimacy, companionship, and mutual fulfillment of a life spent thinking not of "me" but "us."
What strikes me about sex-and-dating discussions nowadays is the total poverty of romance. This is the lifeblood of the poets, the essence of many of our highest values! I don't recognize in them the sort of reckless abandon, or even passionate affection, that has characterized my dating goals since the day I first fell in love in my youth. Perhaps love is just rare. But in all these discussions about body counts and marketplace values and sexual relationship priorities, I see little emphasis on the possibility, however remote, that something profoundly great, sublime even, could ever emerge from an intimate connection with one's lover. It feels like a desacralized, mechanistic, optimized, even inhuman approach to life and love. Where is the lover about which the Bard wrote, who could "see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt"?
Maybe that's just the internet in general -- happy people don't tend to post about their happiness, but bitter people post ceaselessly about their bitterness. And I see little value placed upon that most agreeable of words, "us," and all the value in the world placed upon the darkest and most tempting: "me me me me me me me." This happens not only in people's honest assessments of their current state, but even in their assesssments of what the ideal would look like. Has anyone ever heard of a dating thread where people talk about how passionate they are about romance and how much they want to spend their lives sacrificing and caring for another person? I presume the people who feel this way get eagerly snached up by the first person to realize it.
But nevertheless I continue to believe strongly in the significance of the Third Thing, the love that unites commitment to sex and alchemizes both into something greater and more enduring, about which cummings could write, "love is the every only god."
I don't really think Huberman did nothing wrong, just nothing worth a magazine article over, and certainly not something I should become aware of on Twitter.
Though to be fair, I put a significant probability on the outcome that, if we had theoretical perfect knowledge of events, Huberman actually didn't do anything wrong by NYMag's own standards of sexual ethics and that the weak accusations against him by ex-girlfriends wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. When you write a hit piece, and the best things you can come up with are pretty soft or vague or rely on personal recollections of interested parties, then I tend to doubt pretty heavily.
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