Does Pearl Davis hate women — or does she hate herself?

Of all the people pontificating online about dating and marriage, few figures are more polarizing than Pearl Davis.

Often hailed as the "female Andrew Tate," Davis is a woman who’s made her name by advising men not to listen to women.

Pearl Davis doesn't need your attention, whether scornful or admiring. What she could use are your prayers.

She’s always handy with a provocative generalization — just the kind of thing that gets traction on social media. In a now-deleted post on X, she proclaimed that “16 year old chicks are hotter than 26 year old chicks.” She's also invited female victims of abuse to consider their own complicity: “Was he really abusive or did you bring abuse out of him?”

Other typical Pearl takes include:

• The worst thing a woman can be is fat;
• Women lose their attractiveness (“hit the wall”) at age 30;
• Women should expect and even wantto be cheated on;
• Paternity tests should be mandatory;
• Women should be denied the right to vote.

Such talk has elevated Davis to the level of online villainhood that leads people to compile lists of her worst moments: “The Tragic Tale of Just Pearly Things | The Un-Pickable Pick-Me.”

And that was her plan all along, if you ask those to whom Davis is clearly a grifter who doesn’t believe what she espouses.

The evidence for this seems clear. Davis simply doesn’t live up to her own strict standards for being a high-value woman: virginity, model-level beauty, piety, submissiveness. And she doesn’t care.

In that case, why take the bait? Why give her the attention she so clearly craves?

That’s a question I've had to ask myself after letting Davis get under my skin one too many times.

Lately, however, I've started to see the brokenness beneath her routine. Pandering to the resentful and bitter worst of the "manosphere" seems a bit sad. So does boosting her own value in their eyes by devaluing other women.

In all likelihood, she really does believe at least some of what she says. Raised in a large and wealthy Catholic family, Davis admits to struggling with low self-esteem from a very young age. In manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate, she found confirmation of the deep flaws she always suspected she had. Since then, her project has been to confirm that these flaws exist in all women.

Doing so lets her opt out of normal female intrasexual competition for men by informing men that the contest is rigged and the prize is not worth having. She may be as "low-value" as the women she relentlessly criticizes, but at least she's aware of it.

The problem with this method of status-seeking is that it requires her to take more laughably extreme views as time goes on.

Case in point: a recent X post about how trans women are better at being women because they put “more effort into their appearance than most American women.” She also needs to become increasingly uncharitable to her opponents, making it ever more apparent that her rants are about self-aggrandizement rather than changing minds.

In a way, Pearl Davis is the right-wing version of Aella, the “ex-vangelical” who panders to libertine, "sex-positive," rationalist Silicon Valley men with degrading and extreme displays of promiscuity.

Both women seem obsessively, at times destructively, focused on acting out in the worst way possible. Both seem to have been "traumatized" to some degree by their Christian upbringings.

Were they truly to question their childhood faith rather than simply react to it, they might find valuable wisdom directly applicable to their predicaments. Namely, that every one of us, no matter what mistakes we make, has inherent, infinite value as a child of God.

Pearl Davis doesn't need your attention, whether scornful or admiring. What she could use are your prayers.