While everyone was a combination of aghast and enchanted (the two adjectives often go dichotomously hand in hand) at the initial revelation that Ariana Grande was engaged to Pete Davidson (little known on SNL before being tied to Grande in the spring of this year) after a month of “official” dating (though Grande declares on Sweetener that she “thought him into her life” long ago a.k.a. 2016), it hasn’t taken very much time for Davidson to reveal himself to be a garden variety fuckboy with overtones of misogyny. Not, as so many previously thought, a cute and devoted puppy.
Thriving on the dumping of his far less “mainstream” ex-girlfriend, Cazzie David (who apparently thought the breakup into her life by creating Eighty-Sixed), Davidson quickly capitalized on a blitzkrieg of media appearances to “promote” the relationship as though it were a professional project instead of his actual job as an SNL performer, grossly commenting to Jimmy Fallon of being engaged to Grande, “It’s fucking lit, Jimmy. I feel like I won a contest.” How lovely, to talk of your future bride like some sort of prized pig, or a homely Penelope (Homer’s, not Christina Ricci’s) sort that one would only marry for her dowry.
Davidson’s general preference for objectification under the guise of “bodily appreciation” for his soon-to-be (theoretically) wife persisted most recently on the nexus for where foul white men are forever and always permitted a microphone: The Howard Stern Show.
On the subject of how Davidson feels about others gawking at her very sexualized image (see: “God Is A Woman“), he responded, “I was jerking off to her before I met her. I’ve been there. I’ve been in the other shoes. Who knew I was practicing this whole time [for our relationship]?” Way to sanction the treatment of your fiancée as nothing more than a husk for pervs experimenting with heterosexuality to masturbate to. But hey, it’s all in good fun–right? Have a sense of humor about chauvinism–huh? Yuck yuck yuck. And so the slippery slope in how men are permitted to think this type of behavior–in an attempt to showcase 80s jock villain masculinity–is okay is a prime example of how the president of the U.S. is allowed to mock a woman’s very real trauma, writing it off as a little ninny crying wolf to protect one of his own lapdogs.
While some will defend the once untouchable male right to freedom of speech and “humor” to their death, so much of this inattentiveness to the toxic nature of these hardy har har comments is what has contributed to one of the largest issues plaguing the culture now. Davidson’s brand of self-deprecation (which so frequently becomes synonymous with borderline personality disorder [no doubt also part of the reason why Grande wrote a song called “Borderline”]–that is, when they’re not accusing others of wrong-doing) has trickled down to the wrong person–Grande–who he has essentially taken a shine to using as fodder for his “material” (even well before they were dating). And while he might be well-versed in the form of love known as whipping and petting (verbally lashing before expressing bathetic love), it is not okay for him to excuse away these very public displays of treating her like a package of meat he gets off on gnawing on as a means to prove to everyone else his own worth–which clearly he doesn’t feel on his own without wielding Grande as some sort of proof of his worthiness. As for Grande herself, well, there’s a reason sologamy is the wave of the future.
