Until now, Pete Davidson was mostly famous for dating famous women. You’d be hard-pressed to name a female celeb the SNL alum hasn’t dated. So much so that, at one point, his break-up with Kim Kardashian elicited a series of memes predicting his next girlfriend (it ended up being Emily Ratajkowski).
But this week he’s become known for something else, too. Ribbing on influencers. Which is fair enough on the surface – except his distaste appears to be directed solely towards women (or “girls my age”), despite men being some of the most annoying influencers on earth.
“Girls are just talking to themselves on there,” he scoffed in an interview with . “And they’re like, ‘Okay, come get ready with me.’ I’m like, who the fuck are you? What do you do? Nothing. What the fuck is this?”
Davidson continued: “They make $40 million a year, and I’m like, what? The world’s broken. There are girls my age that go on TikTok, and they’ll, like, mutter a thing and then do this dance, and I’m like, what the fuck are you doing?” He went on to call clips like this “insane” and “lame” before making a joke about showing “soft cock” on OnlyFans to make some money himself.
Naturally, his comments have sparked a backlash, with plenty of people calling Davidson out for his ignorance and sexism. But this sort of rhetoric isn’t unusual when it comes to chastising influencers. Despite increasing concerns about the proliferation of manosphere content from male content creators, for example, ranging from pickup artistry to incel language, or endless male “self-improvement” podcasters, it’s always women who seem to be the butt of jokes when it comes to who’s posting what on the internet. As if whatever men do is automatically more “serious”.
In this case, Davidson’s ire was specifically aimed at “girls”. It’s always “girls” and not “women”; what better way to downplay a woman’s actions and achievements than by infantilising her? With his signature drollness, Davidson could easily be any other Hinge date gone wrong who hates it when women are more successful than him.
In all seriousness, Davidson didn’t kill anyone – they’re just the slightly annoying words of one man. Nothing we haven’t heard before. But his comments do illustrate a broader attitude or ignorance towards women who find ways to make money outside of traditional structures. At a time when the gender pay gap persists across the workplace (current figures suggest that women in the UK will not be paid the same as men until 2056 at current rates), it’s hardly surprising that some women turn to other means to make money – including, yes, influencing. It’s also worth noting that women spend on average twice as much time as men on childcare and household work. Again, it’s no wonder that some women are choosing to work from home and on their own time.
His comments about OnlyFans also fit into a wider pattern of men poking fun at women who make money by showing their bodies online. This criticism is often lazy and half-baked, showing zero consideration or nuance as it relates to the societal apparatus that draw some women to this work, and the culture of objectification that made it possible in the first place. The irony, of course, is that a lot of the men purporting to have a problem with women making money on OnlyFans are the same ones engaging with their content. Nothing fuels the patriarchy quite like cognitive dissonance.
Perhaps that’s the most grating thing of all. Men who chastise women on the internet invariably do so with a galling lack of self-awareness. Don’t get me wrong, plenty of criticism against the influencer economy is valid. Social media platforms are melting our brains, after all, and nobody is arguing that there’s anything inherently noble about using an audience’s attention to sell them various products. But let’s not pretend that this gives men a green light to use such critique as a veil for brazen misogyny. Badmouthing successful women on the internet for the sake of a few laughs isn’t clever or funny; it’s just sexist. Especially when so much of your own fame came as a result of such women in the first place.
