Meet the new Andrew Tate. She's a woman.

I was the only woman in a work meeting recently, where a man told a mildly sexist joke. Nothing overt that you could be disciplined for, but something tired about his wife being a nagging shew. My face must have given my feelings away, because he quickly said:

“I couldn’t say that in most meetings, but you’re cool, right?”

I wasn’t, nor do I wish to be. Being the ‘cool girl’ has long been a tool used to control women and turn misogyny inward. It pits women against each other – much like the poisonous idea of ‘not being like other girls’.

Watch: How to be a woman in 2023. Story continues after video.

But, it seems, there’s always a handful of women willing to throw themselves into the volcano of internalised misogyny for the sake of being popular with a certain sub-set of the boys. The latest YouTuber to enjoy this type of viral attention is Pearl Davis, a proudly ‘anti-feminist’ influencer and fan of Andrew Tate, who reckons women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Andrew Tate is known for his misogynistic views, including that women are men’s property and that they must ‘bear responsibility’ for their own rape, but he’s currently locked up in a Romanian jail on charges of sex trafficking (charges he denies), so there was a Tate-sized internet gap just waiting to be filled.

Enter Pearl Davis, who has the genius point of difference of being a woman.

Davis has clocked up over 1.7 million followers on YouTube, and has 340,000 followers on X. And, although she’s a fan of Tate, his incarceration has been wonderful for her career, with Davis’s YouTube audience growing by 50 per cent in the three months after he was arrested.

A cynical person might think Davis, whose popularity has grown in line with her views becoming increasingly polarising, is in it for the attention and the great wads of cash that will be coming her way in media deals and advertising. But she seems committed to stripping women of their rights, so let’s assume she really believes what she’s saying and that, some day, she’ll hand all she’s earned over to her husband along with all her rights.

Who is Pearl Davis?

Hannah Pearl Davis is a 26-year-old woman from Chicago, who grew up as one of 10 siblings to software engineer parents. Ironically, her mother Jennifer has served on the board of directors for UN Women USA, an independent charity that supports the gender quality programs of the United Nations.

Davis went to private school, and then completed a degree in business economics at Elmhurst University. She held a series of office jobs before moving to London and starting a little YouTube channel called JustPearlyThings in 2020.

It was innocuous at first, with her filming her vox pops on the street, asking people about their views on dating. But in 2022, she started interviewing “red pill” guests (a Matrix reference embraced by conspiracy theorists, which basically means they’re people willing to talk about “the unpleasant truth”), including Andrew Tate, mocking the beliefs of feminism.

Davis reckons her sudden success is because there is “not a lot of empathy” for men online.

“Men are discriminated against in society by the legal system and feminists at large,” she told Insider.

“The women that follow me watch it because they too see the larger issue, men watch it because finally there is a form of media that advocates for men.”

FINALLY.

All of this advocating for the downtrodden man is lucrative business for this cool girl, with Davis’s net worth being estimated around US$225,000 in April this year, but now it’s thought to be around $1 million and rising.

What does Pearl Davis believe?

Davis hangs her hat on the idea that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and that we’re really just here to support men because men’s lives are really hard.

“Men run all of the infrastrutures (sic) that make society run,” she told Piers Morgan on his Uncensored program. “So I just think if we want an equal say in society, then be equal. Do 50 per cent of the hard jobs.”

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A post shared by Pearl Davis (@justpearlythings1)

Morgan was shocked, or at least pretended to be. Either way, when Piers Morgan thinks you’ve gone too far, that’s quite an achievement.

“A lot of people think I’m insane because I don’t think women should vote,” Davis said in one of her videos a few months ago.

She says she “came to this conclusion” because she was trying to figure out “why men were so angry about women”.

“When I started researching this stuff it was pretty easy to figure out why — 90 per cent of women have been on birth control, one out of three women has had an abortion, one out of three women has an STD, the average body count is over five, 95 per cent of women are not virgins on their wedding day — so I understand these complaints,” she concluded, not really explaining anything but pretending that she’d done some sort of credible math equation that equalled women being bad.

Davis said that “the courts, the legal system, all of society is basically pandering and simping for women”, taking aim specifically at single mothers.

“If you pay women to be terrible, then you’re probably going to have more terrible women,” she said.

“The issue is that the politicians, the only way they can get elected, the women vote for them. The reason we can’t see a change in these laws … is because they won’t be re-elected. Does every person deserve the right to vote? Because essentially we have a society where men are just paying for women’s bad decisions.”

In another video, Davis argues that a woman doesn’t “deserve a guy that makes six figures if you’re obese”, adding that it’s the woman’s fault if her partner cheats, and that men should be allowed to hit women back.

“A lot of you guys are shitty wives,” she said. “You don’t cook for your man, you belittle him, you nag on him all the time. You don’t treat him like a man.”

Davis recently shared her solution for all the world’s problems, being a three-pronged approach:

1. Men requiring virginity in order to marry.

2. Take away women’s right to vote.

3. Ban porn.

Confusingly, Davis has admitted to not being a virgin, so I guess she won’t have to share her newfound wealth with a husband after all.

Should we be concerned?

Obviously, Davis’s messaging isn’t going to hit everyone, and she clearly has a specific target market in mind.

As a divorced mother of three with a body count well over five, this writer is most definitely not someone in Davis’s marketing funnel.

But, like Andrew Tate, Davis’s primary audience is impressionable teenage boys and young straight men, who may be lacking in confidence and looking for reassurance that they’re okay.

Her approach is simple and binary: either you agree with her polarising views, or you don’t. And young men who do are reassured that they are superior, never do anything wrong, and that any problems of the world can be attributed to women not supporting them enough.

What may give her a dangerous edge is that Davis offers permission to hold misogynistic views just like Tate, but with an added bonus that Tate could never have. She’s a woman, telling young men they’re superior and that it’s okay to demand submission from other women.

And she’s also a woman telling young women that this is a great way to get popular. To be a cool girl. Look how many followers she has. Don’t you want to be popular like her?

The question is, how long will Davis be the cool girl before the internet tires of her and moves on to the next big thing? Sure, she might make a few bucks, but her wealth is nothing on Andrew Tate’s, which he claims is around $355 million.

Building your career on a platform of internalised misogyny is like sacrificing your girlfriends to be popular with the footy team at school. They might find you interesting and fun for a while, but eventually they’re going to tire of you and move on.

What will she do when her bubble bursts and nobody finds her edgy and interesting anymore?

Feature Image: Instagram

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