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March 26, 2024 - 4:15pm
Is it really news if an unmarried, childless, 48-year-old science and self-improvement podcaster lied to some women he was dating? Evidently so: the latest New York magazine exposé devotes 8,000 words to explaining how popular podcaster and Stanford professor Andrew Huberman maintained multiple long-term girlfriends, all of whom thought they were in a monogamous relationship.
The fact that it is news highlights two features of the contemporary culture that emanates especially from America’s West Coast. Firstly, the gulf between what California-inspired therapy culture promises and what it delivers; and secondly, the viciousness with which contemporary audiences now routinely go after high-profile role models — especially men.
Huberman has reportedly been marinated in therapy culture since his parents divorced messily in his teens. According to the article, he seems expert in wielding its vocabulary to convey emotional attunement to his multiple girlfriends. “I hear you saying you are angry and hurt”, he texts in response to one discovering infidelity. “I will hear you as much as long as needed for us [sic].”
As a discursive register, therapy-speak was developed with the aim of enabling sincerity and authentic encounter; Huberman’s proficiency with it suggests that with skilled bad-faith use it’s equally effective as a tool for manipulation. Still more striking, though, is how neatly this story fits another contemporary pattern: the speed and urgency with which male role models are first deified and then, just as swiftly, attacked.
I’m not sure it really is newsworthy that a highly intelligent and highly sexed man with a painful family history and a world-class vocabulary for emotional manipulation should have had multiple concurrent girlfriends. It is news, though, for a high-profile male role model to have feet of clay in a culture that seems deeply conflicted about masculinity and authority. Before Huberman there was Jordan Peterson, another clearly wounded man who offered advice particularly to young men, and who subsequently and very publicly imploded.
The moment such a male role model achieves prominence, the hunt is on for the ways in which he is less than perfect. These are then wielded to deflate any pretensions he may have had to serving as a figure for admiration or emulation. It’s a pattern that repeats, on a symbolic level, the repeated statue-toppling incidents since the BLM riots. It’s hard to avoid the sense that as with the statues, what’s being attacked is less the specific sins of a particular flawed hero and more the idea that any male figures should stand out and be emulated full stop.
It’s common, when discussing the so-called “crisis of masculinity”, to blame it on loss of economic opportunity, the changing educational landscape, or other structural factors. A more uncomfortable possibility, though, is that at least part of this crisis is attributable less to structural shortcomings, or even the failings of individual men, than something more insidious. That is, a kind of baseline cultural hostility to the idea of prominent men entirely, particularly those who offer themselves as role models.
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Subscribe“It’s unclear what is driving this collective determination to be disappointed by every would-be avatar of masculine competence and agency.”
Really? I would have thought it’s an aspect of modern culture that’s easy to understand.
The disparagement of men has its roots in feminism and has become increasingly strident over the past twenty years, culminating in the concept of “the patriarchy.” Then along came progressivism with its focus on victimhood where all the world’s ills are laid at the feet of white people (especially men), and everyone else scrambles to be seen as the greatest victim entitled to the greatest reparations.
Feminism primarily benefitted middle-class white women at the expense of middle-class white men, thereby allowing those women to take opportunities from their male counterparts. Progressivism, especially the trans movement, has unseated middle class white women as the main victim class, and now there’s a war, primarily based on race, to claim the spoils.
The one constant in all this grifting is that white males are the ultimate oppressors and deserve to be discriminated against to atone for past wrongs. They were the ones holding much of the power, and it’s to everyone else’s advantage to take that power from them.
There’s no real ideology in the culture wars. It’s a straight-forward fight for power and influence based on the concept of victimhood. It’s what happens when a developed society no longer offers real growth and opportunity.
You need to understand that your failures are nothing to do with feminism or progressivism. Stop looking for excuses.
Then are the failures of women, victim groups and progressives caused by ‘The Patriarchy,’ majority identities, and conservatism?
Well, yes. That double-standard has been around for millennia. When women fail it’s all men’s fault. When men fail it’s all their fault.
John Milton captured this phenomenon perfectly in his epic poem Paradise Lost:
Great passage. Nothing changes.
The truth doesn’t change, but attitudes towards it do. In Milton’s time, Adam’s views were considered and accepted. Nowadays, they receive only challenge and condemnation.
Jesus – the ‘Second Adam’ – changed everything; He made a way for us to take radical responsibility for our wrongdoing whilst simultaneously making that recognition of our wrongdoing the gateway to restored relationships. Far from needing to hide our failures, they have become the route back to God and to our true selves. They are what we contribute to grace. Everything has changed.
Bullseye-and the response is…….
Very good.
Only today there was an article on the BBC news website concerning an organisation called ‘Art Uk’ moaning about how Britain was full of statues of white men. In a country that has been populated by white people for well over 5,000 years! Who woulda thunk it?!
There was talk of the need for more statues of ‘people of colour’ and ‘redressing the balance’, as if the only qualification necessary was an abundance of melanin.
I find this division of the world into ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ offensive and ignorant, but I fear we lack the will and confidence as a people and as a culture to push back against this bullsh*t, especially as it would probably mean taking the law into our own hands.
.
What did Jordan Peterson do that warrants comparison with a sleazebag like Huberman? As for Peterson “imploding”, he seems to have recovered quite well.
Agreed – Peterson never imploded, he was given a common medication by his doctor when his wife (still married happily) was diagnosed with cancer, and when he tried to quit the medication, he had a very rare, and destructive set of withdrawal symptoms that North American doctors couldn’t remedy.
He was essentially out of it, and his daughter and son in law arranged for a cure in Russia that had worked but that no one in North America was willing to try (putting into a sustained coma and then bringing him out).
Before very long he was back to his old form (still insightful and occasionally brilliant).
I adore Mary and appreciate the attempt to squeeze deeper meaning out of a sleaze-bag’s escapades, but saying that he “imploded” like the sleaze—bag is dirty pool and a bit offensive.
Benzos are a nightmare. Peterson should have known not to trust American doctors when it comes to prescription drugs.
Benzos are a nightmare. Was surprised he got stuck on these things too
Agreed. And what is Mary’s evidence that Peterson was “clearly wounded”? The ordeal of being smeared and harassed by his university, his colleagues, and his government could easily destroy anyone–the fact that he survived and came back still intending to fight on all fronts is testimony to a strong character forged in fire.
As someone who was initially taken with Dr. Peterson and still respects him but from more of a distance, I’ll submit these three pieces of evidence: 1) he spoke of his experience with major depression and anxiety (before he became famous) 2) his home was (is still?) plastered with Soviet propaganda, supposedly to keep himself in a state of constant, heightened vigilance against totalitarianism 3) he often had fits of weeping in public.
I’d call him more of a haunted than a damaged man–he is also very well-intentioned, earnest, and brilliant–but I don’t think “damaged” is some left-field slur. On the other hand: Who among us is undamaged in every way?
Completely second your thoughts. Poor JBP
Agreed. And why would Mary Harrington quote Helen Lewis’s absurd article in ‘The Atlantic’ in support of such an ‘implosion’ claim? Peterson has taken Helen Lewis apart piece-by-piece more than once, and her ongoing animus against him dates back to JP also eviscerating her good friend Cathy Newman in the wonderful debate between them (nearly 50 million views so far). Her own colleague at ‘The Atlantic’ poses the real question: ‘Why can’t people hear what Jordan Peterson is ACTUALLY saying?‘
Really? I just read the Atlantic article on Wayback, and I thought it was good. I remember him saying – when he was on top of the game — that eventually he will make a mistake. And he did when he drove himself so incessantly. At that point, some do cocaine, some do benzos… etc. He turned completely OCD, unable to quit the running, go out of the public eye, and take time off.
To my mind, he imploded when he was heard petulantly demanding people get the jab, and bitching that even though he got it, they still hassled him at the airport. Sad.Now he’s just another rich celebrity. I miss the old Jordan… the one who still had a wonderful sense of humor… 🙂
I venture to suggest that you are a couple of years behind the times. You should read a little more. JP had a near-death experience because of a mistake in prescribed medical treatment, and he returned to the fray even more articulate, incisive, witty, courageous and popular than ever before: his audience continues to grow in leaps and bounds.
Yes-the hyperlink connects to an article which is 3 years old -and JP seems to be thriving .
Yes. I also thought this was irrelevant
Well said. Doctor P is in the middle of a fifty-city-plus speaking tour that is selling out theaters across the country. I’m curious how Ms. Harrington thinks he’s been “erased”. Am even more curious if she could find even a dozen paying customers to hear her views on anything.
Everybody welcomes a larger-than-life hero when he arrives to save your village from bandit attacks. But the shine soon wears off when the larger-than-life hero stays on to drink all your beer and bed all your women.
Perhaps there should be a film exploring that idea?
The idea that heroes are only human, after all ? That might have been touched on by one or two thousand films in the past 80 years, I’ll let you do the research on that one.
I suspect the tongue was firmly in cheek when that was typed.
Harrington just keeps getting better and better. An absolute joy to read.
Andrew Tate. Jordan Peterson. Donald Trump. Joe Rogan. This guy.
There are many excellent male role models. You people just keep picking the wrong ones….
Could you name a few, and let us see how many would like them as role models?
Barack Obama. David Beckham. Chris Hemsworth.
Totes agree! Those guys have a massive carbon footprint. Imagine if everybody could do what they’ve done to cool the earth! Maybe then the earth would stop being so angry!
OK, they are cool guys (though Beckham is too metrosexual for my taste and I had to Wikipedia Chris Hemsworth). But all are best known for being rich, famous, or president. How clear is it what your average European slob (like me) ought to do to model himself on them?
Silly little girl. None of these people are remotely similiar to one another. Rogan is probably universally liked on this site. Peterson much so too. The other two much less so.
“Silly little girl”?
I really hope that this isn’t the best you can do, Jimmy!
Those people all; have one thing in common – they are heroes to conservatives.
Oh, wait, two things in common – they are all horrendous human beings.
This coming from a little girl who identifies as Champage Socialist, a derogatory term used to identify people consumed by luxury beliefs.
From Wikipedia:
It is a popular epithet that implies a degree of hypocrisy, and it is closely related to the concept of the liberal elite. The phrase is used to describe self-identified anarchists, communists, and socialists whose luxurious lifestyles, metonymically including consumption of champagne, are ostensibly in conflict with their political beliefs.
So you’re either so silly you don’t understand what your moniker actually means, or you’re silly enough to use a moniker that undermines the very beliefs you stand for.
Did it hurt when they removed your sense of humour?
Did it hurt when your brain rejected the transplant?
Real men don’t need role models.
There are two comparisons made here. One is accurate and the other wholly inaccurate. Its true that both men ascended to Intellectual celebrity only to be viciously attacked for character flaws by resentful mobs that revel in the misfortune of others (Schadenfreude).
The difference is that Jordan Peterson didn’t “seek fame.” Fame found him and he reluctantly accepted it. Peterson’s struggle with addiction and seemingly poor personal decision to manage his medical health really did nothing to hurt his credibility amongst his primary audience. His credibility is not tied to personal perfection.
People that admire Peterson’s good faith, intellectual curiosity don’t see him as a prophet. He’s never operated under the banner of “Settled Science.” He operates under the banner of perpetual learning. He tests and retests hypotheses, reports his findings and then interrogates the weaknesses in his findings. He does not proclaim “miracle cures” to his audience. He’s an Empiricist in the truest sense. He’s trying to test the outcomes where abstract concepts are socially implemented using the broadest possible sets of data.
Maybe I need to listen to Huberman more but just glancing over his views and methods, I don’t see a ton of overlap between the two.
It seems like any man or woman that questions progressive narratives risks being labelled right-wing. I think it’s an attempt by progressive thinkers to put people back in their ‘boxes’. It’s also done to black people who dare to step out of their designated victim role. I was dismayed by that woman who put on a gorilla suit and threw eggs at Larry Elder a few years ago in California.
It was worse than that – the woman in the gorilla mask threw bananas at Larry Elder! Obvious racism given a pass because she’s a lefty woman.
Exactly this – the whole ‘white supremacy/ privilege’ thing is simply a way of trying to shut people up. If you are unable to defend your point of view in a coherent manner you can simply give anyone who disagrees with you a label and refuse to engage with them.
None of this is evidence of a crisis of masculinity. The big story of the next 20 years or so is going to be the fallout from the collapse of femininity. At least there are male role models.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, deifying and then subsequently bringing low a male role model has been a bit of an archetype for nearly two thousand years – ever since one man was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.
For many there is no such thing as an ideal male and masculine role model. For many, this is an oxymoron.
I stopped caring what feminists think a couple decades ago.
One of the most important books I have read is Honor: a History by James Bowman. Honor for men is courage; honor for women is chastity — being a good girl.
Also, men live in a world of hierarchy; women have a culture of equality: no other woman is better than she is.
And I add to that the negative side. Men have a culture of insult, which on a day-to-day basis is jocular, but which can escalate into the duel or the fight to the death. Women have a culture of complaint, as in “I can’t believe she said/did that.” Or “I’m never talking to her again.”
Let me just say that educated-class feminist women have No Clue about this. And it shows, starting with Mary Wollstonecraft, the First Feminist.
‘Real Men’ don’t read books or instructions.
I’m not sure that ‘men live in a world of hierarchy, women have a culture of equality’ – I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Anglophone culture is particularly hierarchical, others less so.
Wrong, I think.
Anglophone culture is the most meritocratic of all the developed world cultures and least hierarchical. Compare a business or technical meeting in the US or UK with Japan or Korea – in Japan and Korea, people get to speak based on job hierarchy – in the US and UK, anyone can say anything. France, for all its pretensions of egalite, is far more hierarchical in many ways than the UK.
I had to stop and make sure for a moment, but I agree with you. To those who think it is now so restrictive in the UK or US that one “can’t say anything” as a straight white male or whatnot, I’d ask: Compared to when, compared to where?
You might pinpoint some window of heightened liberty during the last 50 or 60 years, but imagine the situation in 1924 or 1824, etc. Could a man of business or trade labor say whatever he wanted to his boss, to the bishop, or in public–without risking adverse consequences?
Pretty sure you’d be happy for your wife/ sister/ daughter to live in our current culture helped by the early feminists. There would be a lot of us women rather be dead than live in the BS “honour culture” whose apotheosis is ISIS.
It’s somewhat dispiriting that even intelligent women have literally no clue as to what truly motivates men.
I believe the most profound and insightful piece relating to all of this lies in N.S. Lyons latest piece following:
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=330796&post_id=142965660&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=12mqdm&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo2NDg4NjAyNiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQyOTY1NjYwLCJpYXQiOjE3MTE0NTg2MDQsImV4cCI6MTcxNDA1MDYwNCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTMzMDc5NiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.NhXTBfjUR70JTEb2FbDWqk8TFpWi-6V6ol3Bf9-pGTs
Thank you for this reference. Nothing that we didn’t know, but well written and a good reminder of our decline.
‘Leftists who praise polygamy whine about polygamous man’
How tiresome.
Generally spot on from Mary Harrington as usual, but the side-swap on Jordan Peterson was unnecessary and wide of the mark.
The good news is that once sharia is proclaimed as the law of the land, men will be able to have four wives with no bones about it.
Thank you for saying that.
And most importantly – many people can’t tell the difference.
There’s a great book by d**k Keyes – True Heroism from all the way back in 1995 – which looks at this particularly modern phenomenon. He comments on the recent trend of treating autobiographies as untrue if they haven’t revealed some dark secret of the subject. It links back to cynicism as part of the character of our age.
Wow. Just wow. So disappointed in Mary Harrington, who I usually find to be a deep thinker.
Huberman is aa nothing guy who I’ve never heard of. He sounds like a deeply disturbed guy, and a pig who uses women. What does that have to do with Jordan Peterson – one of the most consequential thinkers of our time, who has been in a stable monogamous relationship for 40 years, with 2 successful children?
Sure, Peterson has had his troubles, but they are personal in nature. To me, he is like John Coffee in The Green Mile. He has tried to swallow the evil of the world and it made him sick.
Comparing these 2, and using a linked Atlantic hit-piece as “evidence” of Peterson’s atrocities is very, very disappointing for someone of Harrington’s talents and intellect.
Why compare him to Jordan Peterson? This man is a manipulative fraud.
Jordan Peterson, whatever his message, does not function in the same way at all. He was not built up to take a fall, he spoke the truth and was hounded by academics in Canada for this. He’s actually better known now and he’s doing well on discussion forums.
Peterson will be very surprised to read this dig from Mary. She belittles him by describing him merely as someone who ‘offered advice particularly to young men.’ Given his current Wrestle with God tour is going to 30 US cites from April-June, I’d say he has recovered spectacularly from his sorry experience and subsequent vilification in the media.
“I’m not sure it really is newsworthy that a highly intelligent and highly sexed man with a painful family history and a world-class vocabulary for emotional manipulation should have had multiple concurrent girlfriends.”
It’s not news worthy.
I figured he was a disingenuous player when he described a “relationship ritual” on the beach with his girlfriend. Exposing his personal life bores me.
Agree with the comments criticizing the comparison with JBP. Doesn’t fit.
No mention of the stupidity of the women involved.
Who cares? Huberman is successful becauses he has top-notch credentials and gives authoritative health advice. We dont follow him as a “role model” Many women prefer to share an alpha male than have a beta exclusively. Polygamy is an ancient accepted. practice of alpha males, think Abraham and Jacob. Putting exclusive serial monagamy as the sole virtue is a feminist conspiracy. How about the millions of women who divorced and deserted their husbands because they didnt make enough money? That is the real scandal. But no, feminism praises it because the woman is finding herself. Time for men to ditch the feminist nonsense. Conventional modern morality where women can act like whores between relationships and desert their husbands when they get the urge while men must be monogamous is just a feminist scam.
Clearly this form of manipulation works, at least if you keep your head down. Which is sad. Honesty, openness and frank discussion would otherwise be preferable. Presumably as more men become adept at this, more women will get the kind of «emotionally intelligent »men they want – and be lied to and cheated on by them.
This is all the more cruel when the man (I’m thinking of JP here) has been open about his own flaws and shortcomings (his proneness to depression, for example), and is attacked by women for showing his emotions.
“Before Huberman there was Jordan Peterson, another clearly wounded man who offered advice particularly to young men, and who subsequently and very publicly imploded.” Jordan Peterson “imploded” according to The Atlantic – the entire collective staff of which cannot match his gravitas or influence. Doctor Peterson is currently on a roll, and doing quite well, thank you very much.
Jordan B. Peterson’s “implosion” is news to me.
You can do better than this Mary Harrington.
The worst Mary has dished up. Usually a great read. Feminism as practiced is to blame; their hatred of men and family led to FLCs that holds all men to account, but very few women. Watch Sam Kerr get away with racism. Another great idea hijacked by those who wish to divide and create chaos. At one stage they spoke of helping men escape their onerous responsibilities only to turn tale and heap every I’ll at the feet of males, including those abused as children by females.