I can feel the frustration and disgust activated by Kerry Howley’s deep, dark dive into Andrew Huberman forming a callous I’m about to shrug off. The news cycle has largely moved on, and, sadly, the identities of at least one of the women who came forward has been outed and smeared.
I know the feeling well because I’ve shrugged off bad men — their existence along with their actions and the pain caused by them — many times before. It’s what we’re raised and rewarded to do.
There are many seemingly good reason to shrug it off: first, energy / self preservation (this includes physical and mental health safety); second, where something like one dude’s shitty actions fall in the grand scheme of things or, for example, alongside something like the relentless genocide in Gaza; third, the fear of not wanting to be a wailing banshee of a feminist, per usual, and alienating men or women in my life; and some other reasons too.
But at 40 I’ve come to realize that me shrugging off bad men behavior is part of the WD-40 that helps keep the great lurching machine of misogyny-patriarchy functioning smoothly despite it becoming ever more hideous, perilous, and outdated.
So before I do that, I’m writing this.
One of the worst things that can happen to you after something really bad happens to you is to feel like the story of your harm, pain, or trauma doesn’t matter. Women’s stories categorically matter to me, even Andrew Huberman, unfortunately, doesn’t give a rip.
(If you’re like, “Andrew WHO?” or “wait, what story?” which… fair, the TL;DR is: very famous, hunky, and morally superior pop scientist / podcast host turns out to be emotionally abusive, manipulative, deceitful partner to multiple women.)
You might already be like, OK, big whoop. Or not our business. Yes, I understand this, see? We’ve been conditioned by our matrix for exactly this attitude. And in part, it’s true. The specifics of him, ultimately, don’t matter. But discounting this all together is a key ingredient of the slippery oily slick of that WD-40 I mentioned.
writes thoughtfully:“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.”
This is as much about bad men as it is about good women— we who shrug off, we who normalize, we who grease the gears. We’re a hand in the glove; We’re a bird in the hand.
I’ve come to believe that the single most transformative avenue of self-work one can undertake is to deeply and consistently explore one’s relationship with power.
This includes a brutal awareness and interrogation of our relationships with control (of self — body, etc. — others, and situational outcomes), our proclivity for orientation toward or away from those with power, our tolerance for uncertainty and discomfort, our ability to process fear, and our aptitude for flexion in both dominance and submission.
Everything is about power.
Before I hit puberty, my mom took me to an excruciating mother-daughter workshop at our middle school library whose contents I’ve largely blocked out. The gist was to familiarize ourselves with impending bodily and hormonal changes.
What would’ve prepared me better as a woman in this world was honest, ongoing discussion of power: how to cultivate it, protect it, and wield it responsibly through physicality, sexuality, emotionality, leadership, romantic relationships, words, etc. The many forms it can take, and how to spot it; How to respect or disrupt it. A kind of life course on power would include frank instruction on accountability for harm and how to repair. Also the important lesson that no one is more reckless, or can cause more harm, than someone who believes themselves to be powerless.
I’ve known a lot of bad men in my life — I’ve loved several. They’ve taught me about power.
They’re men in my family. They’re men I’ve worked with. They’re men I’ve dated or slept with, and those that friends or sisters have; they’re men who’ve groped me at a bar or looked at me with hatred when I stepped in to buffer a friend from unwanted advances. They’re men I’ve simply noted, hated, and feared from a distance.
I don’t mean bad as in completely bad. As a Buddhist, I believe in inherent, basic goodness. This kind of bad is more delicate and insidious. It’s so bad precisely because it’s deep in the woodwork. It’s the kind of bad that’s normalized, that’s expected. I mean bad as in conditioned poorly: wounded and self-unaware, externalizing, projecting, and transmuting pain every which way til Sunday. Bad as in obsessed with control, with a zero-sum worldview: if you don’t have power over someone or something, then it’s overpowering you. Which do you choose? Terror fuels toxicity.
Howley’s piece details Huberman’s “mechanisms of control” tentacles, which extend beyond his perfectly-calculated, perfectly-supplemented ultra-athlete academic life that he’s so revered for, into the personal and romantic. In a way, he’s amazingly consistent in his exacting approach. He manipulates his partners’ emotions and calculates dosages of truth for them as if he is adjusting intake of L-Theanine and Magnesium, or the right heaping of AG1.
There’s a phrase often uttered when details of powerful man’s infidelity or otherwise unseemly or asshole-ish actions come to light: What did you expect?
Imbued in this phrase is at least two things: First, a devastating normalization of men’s shittiness (the shrug off we’ve been raised with); Second, an implication of the aghast bystander rather than, or alongside, the perpetrator.
It’s a good question: what do you expect? What should we expect?
We have this chronic human tendency to place folks on pedestals. We project onto others who we wish they were, often without even realizing it. We looooove a tight hero or savior narrative. We grasp for solidity where there is none. And when something inevitably occurs to remind us of that, we’re shocked, confused, pissed, or disappointed. They might have done the worst thing, but the delusion that they could never originated within us. The Buddha called it like he saw it: life is suffering, bro, mostly because of our tendency to do this— grasp desperately at the groundless.
The harder truth is that people are allowed to be complicated and imperfect precisely because we are that. I certainly am. Our individual journeys toward seeing things as they are must include the cultivation of elasticity to not only allow but embrace this — in ourselves and others. This can be a long haul and arduous effort. It also doesn’t mean acquiescence of shittiness or repeating a mindless forive-n-forget cycle (shrug-shrug-shrug).
Lama Rod Owens reminds us that you can love someone by wishing for their liberation, though you do not need to like them. his has been an instructive way forward for me with some bad men in my life.
You don’t owe them a shred of your time or energy if you do not wish. You don’t owe them forgiveness. But you owe yourself liberation from the hardened casing of bitterness and hatred, so ultimately they must be owed it too. It’s not a shrug off, but a hat tip and then you’re on your way. Redemption is possible; you also don’t need to stick around for it.
I dated a less handsome, less successful, and less muscled Andrew Huberman through my twenties. We’ll call him Snaggle.
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