Maybe This is Why You Shouldn't Have Published the Andrew Huberman Story

New York magazine has just published a very long investigative piece on alleged sexual misconduct by the author Neil Gaiman, both contextualizing previously-known allegations and introducing new ones. Writer Lila Shapiro, who clearly did an awful lot of legwork, found several new women who allege various forms of bad sexual behavior against Gaiman. It’s all very serious and disturbing, obviously. I have nothing to contribute and no one cares what I think about such things, so we can leave that story there.

But I’m afraid that Shapiro’s piece does again force me to think about New York’s story last year about Andrew Huberman. You could be forgiven for thinking “New York’s SIMILAR story last year about Andrew Huberman,” but this would not be a correct characterization; where Gaiman is accused of many acts that, if true, rise to the level of sexual misconduct, including rape, the Huberman piece contains no such allegations. Huberman is accused of dating multiple women at the same time without the knowledge of all involved, of infidelity generally, and there’s a bizarre fixation on his regular tardiness. It is not a MeTooing piece. And the trouble, I’m afraid, is that the piece was written, edited, packaged, and promoted in a way that inevitably gave audiences the impression that such allegations were included - that Andrew Huberman had been MeToo’d.

The fact that the piece contains no allegations of that type, but seems to have been very deliberately associated by New York, its author Kerry Howley, the magazine’s social media channels, and their many media kaffeeklatsch allies with MeToo stories, was a terrible error in editorial judgment. The Gaiman story helps underline why: this shit is so serious that we can’t afford to play around with these types of narratives. The Rolling Stone University of Virginia gang rape fraternity initiation story, a narrative that fell apart under the barest scrutiny and should never have survived even an amateur journalistic investigation, did a lot of damage in our ongoing efforts to take sexual assault on campus seriously. There’s a higher bar to clear with this stuff for that reason, and the Huberman story utterly failed to clear it.

The story’s presentation in the magazine was draped with innuendo, with as many leading terms and dark implications as can be stuffed in. The image on the cover is styled and colored to make him look sinister. People associated with New York tweeted about the piece as if it was a nuclear bomb, using the kind of language that we’ve grown accustomed to when a MeToo story is published and kills a career. I would argue that the story is deliberately written in the slow-burn reveal style that is typically deployed in MeToo stories - that’s deployed, in fact, in the Gaiman story. (There it makes sense, because the slow burn leads to actual accusations.) At every opportunity, the story exaggerates the implication of a man who, yes, was a shithead to some women he dated. The article is forever presenting quotidian-if-unfortunate behaviors and acting as though we should interpret those behaviors as worthy of the kind of censure that has been brought to bear by men guilty of sexual misconduct in the MeToo era. “I experienced his rage,” says one of Huberman’s exes, suggesting some sort of domestic violence situation, when in fact that’s a reference to a verbal argument - again, maybe unfortunate, but simply not in the world of misconduct.

The magazine’s internal references to the piece, and their social media, played up the usual teasing manner of such publicity, broadly hinting at bad behavior in the realm of sex and romance. The repeated phrase used was “manipulative behavior, deceit, and numerous affairs.” I don’t need to tell you that many people, trained by six-plus years of reading about sexual misconduct, are going to assume that a vast cover story in one of the country’s biggest magazines about a man’s bad behavior and deceit towards his partners is going to be a MeToo story. As many would go on to say, the fanfare and length and publicity about the piece themselves implied that it was a MeTooing. After all, what else would justify that level of attention?

Which of course is exactly what happened. The immediate response to the piece’s publication saw many thousands of people on social media starting from the assumption that Huberman had been MeToo’d. The team at New York could not have failed to predict that outcome. Then, there was another wave on Twitter: a widespread exclamation of “Wait, that’s it?” Because people have brains and they know what pool the story was swimming in and inevitably noted the disjunction between implication and actual accusation. Meanwhile, people in left-leaning media (that is, all media that is not explicitly conservative) tended to ostentatiously praise the story and Howley, pulling out lines like “The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.” Which would be quite damning if misconduct allegations were built on zingers. But they aren’t; they’re built on accusations. And perhaps if Howley had found more serious accusations, she wouldn’t have needed the zingers.

Many, many people felt the way that I did when the piece came out, amazed at the shameless way that the magazine and their writer invoked the MeTooing genre without ever getting to actual misconduct. Wrote Suzy Weiss at the time,

when I saw that New York magazine had devoted over eight thousand words to a guy known for advising listeners how to optimally sleep, eat, exercise, and mate, I expected that they had the goods. I read the line, “The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you,” and prepared myself for an exposé where Huberman gathers his harem together and brands them, NXIVM-style. Or that he drinks the blood of young women after his daily cold plunge. A weird kink. Even a kink. Anything!

But there is nothing. Or just about nothing—that is, assuming you are a human being living in the real world who would be neither surprised nor scandalized to learn that jacked, attractive, smart, successful men tend to date multiple women at the same time and then lie about it.

It is unfortunate that particularly successful men have a habit of seeing multiple women at the same time without telling them. But it is not criminal, and it is not in the same category of sexual harassment or assault. And there is absolutely no value in blurring those lines, in our efforts to stamp out sexual misconduct.

But of course Suzy Weiss is Bari Weiss’s sister, which means she comes from the wrong tribe and could safely be ignored. I am neither in Weiss’s tribe nor Huberman’s, but I am also easily ignored. Still, Weiss’s basic logic there seems quite impregnable. I simply do not believe that Howley or the rest of the team behind that story didn’t know that many would jump immediately to the wrong conclusion, or simply swim in the vague prurience of half-accusations and self-righteous language. Anyone at New York who tells you that the piece was not meant to immediately evoke MeToo and the many MeToo stories we’ve seen since 2018 is lying. I could simply ask this question: if you don’t believe that what Andrew Huberman has been accused of is as bad as what Neil Gaiman has been accused of, why would both deserve nearly identical wordcounts, placement on the cover, internal publicity, and general fanfare? If the sexual assaults that Gaiman is accused of are worse than Huberman dating multiple women at once, what does it say that you gave the Huberman piece the exact same rollout?

If your position instead is that we should lump infidelity and being inconsistent and being a jerk in with sexual harassment and assault, then I think you’re crazy, but you have the right to do so. But you actually have to have that argument, not sneak it in as an assumption in a story that (as New York would not stop reminding us at the end of the year) would go on to be their most successful of the year. If the point was to punish Huberman, it appears to have largely failed; his podcasting guru career has carried on along.

I am not a fan of Andrew Huberman. I have never listened to a second of his podcast, and that kind of neuroscience woowoo self help horseshit is in fact the very last thing I want to spend my time on. I have never listened to his appearances on other podcasts. I have no attachment to him or his work at all. I do, in fact, think that the guy was unfairly sullied by the piece, and that matters. But I also think that the ethics of these kinds of pieces are exquisitely sensitive and incredibly important to get right, for everyone’s sake. I of course don’t condone infidelity or being dishonest, and if Huberman was dating my sister, I would have a big problem with what I read about his behavior. But he’s not dating my sister. I have no personal connection to him at all and so his personal morality is irrelevant to me. And there’s no reason at all for a journalistic outfit to be bringing out his dirty laundry in this way. A very clear line has historically been drawn between alleged criminal behavior and legally actionable harassment, on one side, and simply being a bad partner on the other. And one sensible reason for that is that if you start reporting on who’s a shitty boyfriend, reports of alleged sexual misconduct are inevitably going to be watered down and thus weakened.

Here’s my reckless speculation: the team at New York believed that they had uncovered or would definitely uncover an allegation of actual sexual misconduct against Huberman and committed considerable time and resources to finding such an allegation, only to come up empty. Perhaps they had a source that suggested such a thing was out there to be found, or perhaps they simply believed that they had enough smoke to be sure that there was some fire. But, well, they never found any. The trouble is that a long-term investigation like the one Howley undertook is quite expensive. Howley makes it very clear just how much time and travel she dedicated to the piece, which is standard fare when a magazine pulls its cock out for a cover story. Howley herself, I imagine, doesn’t come cheap. So she went and talked to a lot of women and found that Huberman dated multiple women at the same time without them always knowing about each other, and also that he misses appointments often - a truly deranged amount of time in that piece is dedicated to the punctuality of a fairly obscure podcaster - but no smoking gun of sexual harassment or assault, the big-ticket news items, I have to assume, they were looking for. So they decided to go ahead with what they had and dress it up as a MeToo story, and the result is what we got: a grimy and prurient story of a minor celebrity’s shitty behavior with women, told with a level of self-righteousness that’s usually reserved for, well, you know.

I could be wrong, about all of this. Could be. You can tell me. But I don’t think I’m wrong. And I think the visceral feeling of reading something like the piece about Gaiman might clue you in to why I feel so strongly about this.

Simultaneous to publishing the main story, New York made the truly inexplicable choice to publish an addendum headlined “All of Neil Gaiman’s Halted and Canceled Projects,” written (to the degree that there’s anything to write) by Jason P. Frank. It’s as if they wanted to prove for sure that they were in the business of monetizing public morality. I have absolutely no idea what they think they’re doing with that piece; it has such little information and such obviously prurient intent, it’s impossible not to call it an effort by one of the country’s biggest magazines to monetize the suffering of women who allege that they’ve been sexually assaulted. The investigative cover story, while it makes some choices I would not, appears thorough, deeply considered, responsible, and sufficiently evenhanded. It’s unfortunate that sex crimes still require prosecution by the press, but at present such work is necessary and that piece did its job. The “Halted and Canceled Projects” post is clickbait, and the bait is rape.

I have no ability to influence anybody at big-deal publications like New York. So I’ll just leave a little free advice, free as in free to ignore, which they certainly will: if you want to continue with this whole New York: SVU routine, it might be a good idea not to trivialize sexual assault with a fucking listicle.