Why Is Everyone So Emotionally Fragile? - Whitney Cummings - #827

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Whitney Cummings. She's a comedian, actress, writer, and a podcaster. Emotional maturity is a difficult thing to truly come by, making your needs known, setting boundaries, being able to disappoint people without being afraid. But if it's such an important skill, why is it so hard to discover how to develop it? Expect to learn how Whitney has been changed since becoming a mother, why Whitney has been thinking about circumcision so much, what co-dependence is and how to overcome it, why your niceness might be narcissism in disguise, why the news and memes are moving at such an insane velocity right now, and much more. Don't forget, People of Australia, my live show is coming to you this November and tickets are selling very quickly for Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. You can get yours right now by going to chriswilliamson.live.australia and you can do the same if you live in London or anywhere in the UK or anywhere in the globe, anywhere on the planet. You can come to London on the 28th of November and see me at the event in Apollo with 3599 other people by going to chriswilliamson.live.australia. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Whitney Cummings.
What has changed since becoming a mother?

**Whitney Cummings** (1:38)
I stopped getting Botox.

**Chris Williamson** (1:40)
Okay. Is that the big thing?

**Whitney Cummings** (1:42)
Stop smoking weed, stop getting Botox.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
Okay.

**Whitney Cummings** (1:45)
You know, a lot of things. I start with the sort of more facetious ones, but I'm obviously off birth control. After I became a kid, I went off, and I can't believe how much clearer I am, less emotional I am, less judgmental I am, less attracted to gay men I am. And then I was like, okay, what else am I putting in my body? You know, because as soon as you have a baby in utero, you care about your own health, you know? And then I'm like, I'm not gonna drink tap water anymore. Instead of spending money on stupid shoes that are gonna give me blisters, why don't I spend it on glass bottle water, whatever, you know? And in trying to care for my son and protect him from microplastics and chemicals and stuff, I accidentally took care of myself and cannot believe how much better I felt. And I spend so much time now thinking of, like when I see my girlfriends acting crazy or women acting crazy, I'm like, maybe Amber Heard just wore too much deodorant.
Maybe we need to get Rose McGowan off tap water. You know, like, what are all the chemicals? And I know this is very in the zeitgeist right now. You talk about it, Huberman talks about it. There's people that actually know what they're talking about. But in my own, you know, research on myself, I'm like, I cannot believe how many chemicals I was putting in my body before and how much better I feel now that I'm not. The Botox thing was more of, you know, you can't get Botox when you're pregnant. And once I was pregnant, I couldn't believe how much better I was all of a sudden communicating. And I was like, oh, this must just be because I'm compassionate now and it's hormonal and like I'm connecting with people more. But we're designed to read micro expressions. And I look at all my past toxic relationships where we had like trouble communicating, or, you know, I expected the person to read my mind or just like know what I meant on my face or something. And they-

**Chris Williamson** (3:24)
Meanwhile, you've got a stone face.

**Whitney Cummings** (3:26)
I know, I'm just like, no, what do you mean? Everything's fine. Like I just am now like women and men, I think, are having a harder time communicating than ever. And we're just adding more and more things to make it more and more difficult.

**Chris Williamson** (3:37)
Like Botox that literally stops you from having facial expression.

**Whitney Cummings** (3:40)
Correct. Correct. And so I was like, let me just stop because also, look, I blazed my entire body in my twenties. I have no pubes. I have no nothing. Like if I don't have any wrinkles either, I'm just going to be attracting pedophiles. So why don't I, like also what kind of person wants to be with a woman with no pubes and no wrinkles? Like that's, I think Epstein Island's closed, but like, you know, I don't know. The more I think about this, the more I'm like, I'm just deciding to become the most authentic person. Even if it's someone that I'm not a hundred percent proud of all the time, so that I don't attract the wrong person. I think this is something that, you know, I realized is that we put on this thing to try to attract as many people as we can, but we might attract the wrong person, you know? Like the guy that wants a woman with like no wrinkles, like, do I even want to be with that guy? You know, I stopped, I mean, I'm on your show, so I had to wear a little makeup. I don't want the comment section to be too brutal, but I stopped wearing so much makeup, you know, which I always thought like, oh my God, this is going to make a man attracted to me, but it's going to maybe make the wrong man attracted to me. So a lot of that. I also have this weird obsession with how into me men were when I was pregnant. It made me like love men in this weird way. I just saw a different side of men when I was pregnant. And I think this thing of, you know, men don't want, you know, don't have like caretaking, whatever it is, like whatever bullshit I got from my mom programming me, cause I came from a lot of bad divorce, and I was, you know, fed this narrative that my dad was this monster and this, you know, they were both, you know, had a lot of work to do, but I just, and I had a son, you know, and once you see a little baby boy and you like, they start out so innocent, you're like, how do we get from this, you know, to such a toxic place? And I'm fascinated.