The enigma of Pete Davidson, the comedian with a tragic life who has fallen in love with the most powerful women in show business

"Have you told your girlfriend you love her or is Pete Davidson going to have to do it for you?"

This is how the internet rose to the rumors, just a year ago, that Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian were together.

The comedian has been one of the most analyzed celebrities of 2022. Half of the articles about him focus on his love life: he started the year with Kardashian and now ends it with the model Emily Ratajkowski.

The other half try to explain why he is famous or, more specifically, how he manages to seduce the most famous women in the world.

The British newspaper

places Davidson "at the center of absolutely all American culture."

What does Pete Davidson have to obsess the internet?

Most people who follow every step of Davidson's love life have little idea what he's known for in the first place.

His signing in 2013 for the

humor program at just 20 years old made him the wonder boy of American comedy and his childhood, marked by the death of his firefighter father in the attacks on the Twin Towers when he was seven years old, captivated public opinion: the entire Davidson generation is a child of 9/11, but in his case it is literal.

He turned that tragedy into comedy, with a therapeutic effect for him and grotesque for others.

In a Comedy Central special he told Justin Bieber: “I've always regretted growing up without a father…until I met yours.

Now I'm glad mine is dead."

Pete Davison and Ariana Grande at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards gala.Nicholas Hunt (Getty Images for MTV)

Fame, however, came to him from his relationship with singer Ariana Grande in 2018. Davidson was dating Cazzie David, Instagram muse and daughter of Larry David, who found out through the networks that her boyfriend was now Grande's boyfriend .

Twenty-four days later, the couple got engaged to a €90,000 ring and the public spent the summer of 2018 consuming their declarations of love on Instagram, their photos kissing on the street, Davidson's tattoos in tribute to his girlfriend (which covered the Cazzie David's face) and the little pig they adopted as a pet in their 16 million euro apartment.

That romantic comedy even had a soundtrack: Grande included a song titled

on her album

.

But it turned into a horror thriller when within weeks the singer's ex-boyfriend, Mac Miller, died of an overdose, Davidson's and Grande's Instagram walls were flooded with messages blaming them for the death, and the couple broke off their engagement ( which translated into the biggest hit of Grande's career,

).

Days later, Davidson posted a suicidal message on Instagram, alerting the NYPD and Grande, who went to the building where her ex-boyfriend was staying and left him a public Instagram message saying, "I'm downstairs."

The singer even interacted with people asking why she didn't call him directly (she clarified that she didn't have her number).

That night the internet was held in suspense by what could have been a live-streamed suicide and ended up being one of the greatest displays of privacy ever experienced by celebrity culture.

"To understand culture in 2018," headlined

, "you have to understand the relationship between Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson."

This radical exhibitionism raised Davidson's media cachet.

Now that celebrities are fighting to protect his privacy, he brazenly flaunts his and treats the entire internet as his

Instagram

Each of his successive relationships, all with famous women, replicated the formula: he tongue-kissed Kate Beckinsale at a basketball game;

he held hands with Margaret Qualley at the Venice festival (and met her mother, Andie MacDowell, via Zoom);

he attended with Phoebe Dynevor (

) to tennis matches in which both wore pendants with the other's initials;

and he posed at parties with Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford.

All these women couldn't keep their hands off him even though there were thousands of people in front of him.

And they all left him within six months.

With each couple, the enigma spread: not having a conventional beauty, many did not stop wondering what his seduction secret was.

Pete Davidson became a riddle that the internet was determined to decipher.

Pete Davidson shows off his multiple tattoos during a shoot in New York in 2019. Bobby Bank (GC Images)

The first response responded to an antediluvian trope: Pete Davidson is a

The Casanova's sexual vigor is irresistible to women who, according to the prejudices of a status-obsessed society, are out of their league.

After the death of chef Anthony Bourdain, a Twitter user coined the term "Big dick energy" or BDE (literally, "big dick energy") to refer to the attitude of those people so sure of themselves that they go through life relaxed because they have nothing to prove.

You didn't have to have a big penis to have BDE, you didn't even have to have a penis.

Rihanna has it.

Cate Blanchett has it.

Cardi B has built a career off of it.

And the consensus was that Pete Davidson overflowed with precisely that energy.

In his case, apparently, it is not a metaphor:

.

Pete Davidson is a modern celebrity who has unearthed old phallocentrisms.

He took it as a joke.

"Not true," she clarified.

“Ariana has very small hands.

Everything is huge to her.

She said that so that all the girls who see my dick for the rest of my life will be disappointed.”

But if Pete Davidson understood where his attraction lies, he would ipso facto stop having it.

A Reddit discussion thread surrounding the mystery reached 2,800 comments.

Among them, "He seems like the type of man who doesn't mind holding his girl's bag", "He's the

of men" or "He's like the drug dealer who sells you marijuana with whom you feel safe for some reason. reason, and when he starts playing tricks on you, you realize you'd fuck him."

The singer Olivia Rodrigo, born in 1993, pointed him out as her “

”.

Another singer, Dionne Warwick, born in 1940, tweeted that she would be "Pete Davidson's next girlfriend."

Emily Ratajkowski herself, a year before she started dating him, contributed her theory on the Seth Meyers show: “He's tall, he's super charming, he's vulnerable, he's adorable.

His nails are impeccable.

He has a good relationship with his mother.

Pete Davidson covers a kiss from British actress Phoebe Dynevor in London during the summer of 2021.Paul Edwards (WireImage)

Pete Davidson's success has also been scrutinized in terms of a new masculinity: a man in touch with his emotions and candid about his sanity.

“He has a huge heart, perhaps wounded, and impatiently available inside the body of a boy you would expect to beat the crap out of in school,” actress Tommy Dorfman wrote in a

magazine story in which Davidson satirized her image .

public posing as a Ken doll full of tattoos, without a penis and surrounded by antidepressants.

Davidson's figure is a response to the

, the archetype of a man who is nice to women until one rejects him and then he unleashes all his misogyny.

Pete Davidson genuinely likes women.

He likes them.

“When I'm in a relationship I treat the person like a princess,” he explained.

"But sometimes you put so much into someone that you overwhelm them and they don't know if they'll ever feel the same way about you."

Perhaps that is why many have wanted to show his affection in public to appease his insecurities.

Christine Taylor, Ben Stiller, Pete Davidson, Emily Ratajkowski, Jordin Sparks and Dana Isaiah during a game between the Memphis Grizzlies and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden on November 27.

It was Davidson and Ratajkowski's first public appearance as a couple. Jamie Squire (Getty Images)

Davidson was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and has confessed that he tried to commit suicide at the age of nine, that he harmed himself (he came to pull out all the hairs on his head) and that a group of psychologists monitored him for years to study the consequences of 9/11 -S.

He did not rush to reveal the reason for his departure from

after seven seasons it was that he felt the show was laughing at him.

Everyone likes to side with a loser and Pete Davidson is the loser who best represents the current decade: for a population that lives with the permanent feeling that everything is a simulation, Pete Davidson is an inexplicable heartthrob, perfect for unexplained times.

But within that happy question, what is Pete Davidson's secret?, is the answer: he is one of the few celebrities who still maintains a mystery.

The comedian and the

influencer

Davidson and Kardashian's first appearance as a couple was on a roller coaster in an amusement park on Staten Island, the New York district where he grew up.

This childish enthusiasm arouses sympathy among the public.

Davidson is like the linnet in John Hughes movies who flirted with the prom queen (and succeeds time and time again) and who is removing most of his 104 tattoos (he has tributes to Harry Potter, Hillary Clinton or Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a drawing of Stewie from

Smoking a joint).

It is clear that fame attracts him, but more than desperate to achieve it, he seems amazed by its size and its performance.

“Ariana said: I want a pig!

And an hour later a pig appeared.

I can't get Propecia [a hair loss medication] prescribed and that girl got a pig in an hour,” she recounted.

Pete Davidson is an insider in the celebrity realm.

The second appearance of Kardashian and Davidson, already on a red carpet, was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Although that relationship was considered a "pedigree stamp" towards him, she does not approach anyone who is not going to enhance her brand.

Kardashian knew that going with him to the Met Gala would have an unprecedented impact, but at the same time, Davidson would not eclipse her Marilyn Monroe moment.

Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian at the 2022 Met Gala. Dimitrios Kambouris (Getty Images for The Met Museum /)

Most of Davidson's couples had just gone through a traumatic separation, suggesting that the hookup enlivened their grief with good sex, better laughs, and heartwarming bowling alley dates.

And by the way, the photos making love to each other hit their exes in the face.

Ariana Grande defined her relationship with Davidson as "a fabulous distraction, fun and frivolous."

The journalist Emma Specter defends in

that Ratajkowski "deserves a

post-divorce roll.

Pete Davidson has become the nail that pulls out another favorite nail of the famous.

“The appeal of him is that he understands his role,” says Arwa Mahdawi in

.

“He'll spend time with your kids, take you to dinner at his favorite Staten Island hangout, provide lots of photos for your publicity team.

And then, when the course of the relationship runs out, he'll step aside without any drama.

She will remove the tattoos without fanfare.

He will not say anything negative in the press.

She will get through it without poison.”

This imbalance presents Pete Davidson as a tragic figure.

Davidson and Kardashian broke up in the summer, according to rumors, because he wanted to start a family (his life dream is to be a father) and she didn't.

A few months after starting, he got three tattoos: the names Jasmine and Aladdin next to the infinity symbol (they met recording a

Saturday Night Live

), the initials of the four children that Kardashian has with Kanye West and the phrase "My girlfriend is a lawyer", in reference to the law degree that she obtained in May of this year.

She defined those tattoos as "scars."

It's like she's already anticipating the pain of the breakup.

Her body is a map of her traumas.

And if she forgets, she will already be on the internet to remind her.

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