Pete Davidson points out double standard in all that "big dick energy" talk

“Big dick energy” is, for better or worse, a pretty indelible part of the lexicon at this point—so much so that it can be easy to forget it all started with the discourse around Pete Davidson and his relationship with Ariana Grande. Davidson, for his part, seems to wish it hadn’t. “It just got to a point where I was… I got really tired of my whole career just being like my personal life,” he told Charlamagne. “And living through that is sort of traumatic. Like not to be, like, lame, but like it’s traumatic to live in your own crap all the time.” He also expressed how “embarrassed” he was by all the 2018 attention because “no one talked about any work I was doing… They were just like, ‘Oh, that’s the fuck stick.’ And that hurt so much.”

Davidson also pointed out the hypocrisy of the whole thing in his interview. “I don’t want to victimize myself in any way because I’m cool, but the sexualization of me—if that was a girl, people would be like, there would be a march for it,” he said. “Seriously. You’re just talking about my dick all day.” He also hypothesized that the sheer amount of attention he got was partly due to his looks. “Why are they focusing on me?” he asked. “It’s ’cause I’m not Glen Powell handsome. I’m just this dude that tells dick jokes that is a drug addict.” 

This isn’t the first time Davidson has weighed in on all that big dick attention. He previously joked about it in a 2019 comedy show, saying “I don’t like that she talked all that shit for my penis” about Grande, per E! News. “Everything is huge to her,” he went on. “Why would she tell everyone that I have a huge penis? So that every girl who sees my dick for the rest of my life is disappointed.” He also expressed his ire with the online landscape in general—a frustration that led him to exile himself from social media—in an interview with Variety in 2018. “The internet is evil, and I don’t like how it affects me,” he shared. “I don’t like how the internet is a place where anybody can shit on you and make anything up. I’ve worked really hard to get my brain to this place. I can’t go online like everybody else because it’s just a fuck-fest. And now I get to enjoy my life.”