Redeem now - A new creator has been thriving in the space Andrew Tate left behind while in jail.
- Pearl Davis appeals to a similar audience, and spiked in popularity since Tate was arrested.
- Despite criticism from other creators, Davis told Insider she doesn't think she is a misogynist.
While Andrew Tate is locked up in Romanian jail, mostly unable to communicate with his fans, another creator is gaining traction.
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in.Hannah Pearl Davis, known as just Pearl, is booming in popularity with a brand of anti-feminist content that lands differently since she is a woman herself.
Davis, who is 26, saw her YouTube audience grow 50% in the three months since Tate was detained, per the analytics tool Social Blade. Her subscriber base jumped from around 800,000 to 1.3 million in that timeframe.
She has increasingly been nicknamed the "female Andrew Tate," including by critics who consider her the latest celebrity misogynist.
Her podcast "The Pregame" sees Davis debate with and criticize feminists, praise Tate's teachings, and present herself as a rare champion for a male point of view.
Unlike Tate, Davis does not consider herself a misogynist, telling Insider via a direct message that "I don't hate women."
Instead, she argued, criticism of her work is the inevitable backlash now that "finally there is a form of media that advocates for men."
As well as a ready YouTube audience — which viewed her videos some 200 million times since December — Davis regularly goes viral on TikTok. There, videos with the hashtag #justpearlythings have over 300 million views, making headway on the platform where Tate's soundbites also found their most receptive audience.
@justpearlythings.5 ♬ original sound - PearlBreakout clips include her arguing that it's a woman's fault if her male partner cheats, that men should be able to hit women back, and that women don't deserve a man "who makes 6 figures" if they are obese.
"A lot of you guys are shitty wives," Davis said in one recent video, viewed 3.2 million times, blaming infidelity on a woman's looks and behavior. "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." In several follow-up videos Davis responded to the negative criticism she'd attracted and doubled down on her view.
"Are Western women typically known as good wives?" she asked. "Are they sought after all over the world, or are men getting their passports and going elsewhere?"
In another video, which got 1.6 million views, she said that when unmarried women get pregnant it is "99.9999% the woman's fault."
A pivot to gender-wars content that paid off fast
Davis grew up in Chicago, Illinois in a 10-bedroom home with her nine siblings and parents, software entrepreneurs Dan and Jennifer Davis.
Her mother for a time was on the board of directors for UN Women USA, an independent charity that supports the gender-quality programs of the United Nations.
In 2020, Davis started posting on both TikTok and YouTube, starting with lighthearted content about her life: subjects like the time her dad bought a massive waterslide for their backyard, or funny moments with her mom.
She amassed around 100,000 followers on her first (now-deleted) TikTok account with a series called "Breakup Quiz," where she helped people work out why they were dumped.
She also gained some exposure from her brief relationship in 2021 with Oneya D'Amelio, a TikToker who found early fame on the app for his aggressively positive messages under the name "AngryReactions."
Davis told Insider she got interested in YouTube in college, and from there became set on a media career.
"I really enjoyed watching Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, and some other YouTubers," she said, namechecking two heroes of the US political right known for stridently opposing left-wingers.
In the past year, Davis has entered that same sphere, teaming up with manager Coby DeVito, a former colleague of Shapiro at The Daily Wire.
Davis started gaining consistent traction around May 2022, surging from a modest 25,000 subscribers to over half a million in six months. The boom was driven by increasingly edgy content.
@justpearlythings.5 ♬ original sound - PearlShe moved to London and found success filming interactions with people on the street, asking them questions about dating, like if "sleeping around" is different for men or women, or whether it matters what a woman's "body count" is.
In more recent months Davis has leaned into snappy podcast clips with so-called "red pill" guests (a "Matrix" reference), most notably Tate himself before his arrest.
Her videos boast of her "owning" feminists in debates and mocking the beliefs and values of modern women.
As of March, Davis has over 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube and 410,000 TikTok followers. On YouTube, her following is almost twice as large as the 700,000 Tate had when he was banned from the platform.
Davis attributes her success to fighting men's corner, saying there is "not a lot of empathy" for them 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."
Other creators see warning signs in Pearl's success
Laura Danger, who has a TikTok audience of 460,000 for her social-justice content, told Insider she believes Davis is emulating Tate's success, reaping the rewards of perpetuating harmful gender dynamics as "another cog" in the misogyny machine.
"The deeper she gets into this misogynistic messaging, the more she's being rewarded by these men," Danger said. "She is getting a ton of attention, especially from men who are saying, 'Yes, finally someone is telling the truth, you are the one, you get it.'"
Steven Bonnell, better known by his streaming alias Destiny, has debated Davis several times in YouTube videos, arguing against her claims that "women like to be cheated on," that women have it "easier" in society, and her reluctance to believe the sex-trafficking allegations against Tate.
Bonnell told Insider that Davis and those like her create a strong connection with audience by saying "things that people on the other side of the political aisle won't acknowledge," including ways some men feel the dating scene is unfair.
He said she also rightly focuses on men's mental health as a wrongly marginalized issue. But from there, he argued, she leads audiences to wrong conclusions.
Barrett Pall, a life coach and TikToker with 2 million followers who posts about fighting misogyny, sees Davis as part of a larger reactionary trend. Davis is a response, he said, to male dominance "truly being challenged at a very, very big scale in a way that we've never seen before."
"She is part of patriarchy's ability to have women sit and internalize misogyny, which harms themselves," he said.
Responding to that claim, Davis told Insider: "Misogyny is the hatred of women. I don't hate women."
"For some reason acknowledging a basic truth like men and women are different is labeled as misogyny nowadays," she said.
@destinyggvids Destiny debates Pearl on men and women leadership/roles | #destiny #streamer #destinydebates #debates #justpearlythings #redpil ♬ original sound - DGGRiding a tide of rage-clicks
Mia Shah-Dand, the CEO of the tech consultancy Lighthouse3, noted that inflammatory content drives engagement, and can tempt creators to make claims they don't necessarily believe.
"Even well-meaning people become dupes in their whole cycle of just getting hatred ratings," she said. "They just found this market that they can tap into and they just will ride this wave to the top."
Davis denied exaggerating her opinions for rage clicks, though she did concede that short clips on platforms like TikTok inherently don't have much nuance.
Davis' posts have got her into occasional trouble, including a brief ban from TikTok in January, from which she quickly recovered.
"I will say a lot of clips can be taken out of context in a 3-hour podcast, so many don't get the context of the discussion," she said. "But all in all, no, I stand on what I say."
Pall said while Davis is clearly enjoying the notoriety and the followers for now, she may one day find she is "hurt by her own rhetoric."
"She has to be perfect and not end up a single mom, or not end up pregnant, out of marriage, or gaining weight, or whatever else it is," he said. "She's on a pedestal, and the only place to go from there is down."
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