Pete Davidson is setting the record straight about years of headlines that focused less on his comedy and more on the size of his manhood.
The conversation around Davidson’s private life started back in 2018 when Ariana Grande, his then-girlfriend, responded to a fan’s tweet in a way that went viral. A fan had asked, “how long is pete???” referring to the short song she’d written about him. Grande cheekily replied, “like 10 inches? …oh f–k…i mean…like a lil over a minute.” The tweet was deleted soon after, but the damage was done. Suddenly, Davidson was at the center of an online phenomenon labeled “BDE.”
Years later, the comedian admits he never found it funny. “I thought that was super weird,” Davidson said about Grande’s comment, and now he’s speaking out about how the media doubled down on the narrative.
On The Breakfast Club podcast, he explained just how much the constant objectification hurt him. “I was embarrassed by it. No one talked about any work I was doing. They were just like, ‘Oh, that’s the f–k stick.’ And that hurt so much.”
Davidson said that even his coworkers at Saturday Night Live could see the toll it took. “I think after a year or two, everyone saw how sad I was about it — and embarrassed. I was never on Instagram flexing that lifestyle at all; I was very embarrassed by it,” he admitted, before noting, “No one was outrightly mean by any means.”
Podcast host Charlamagne tha God admitted he was shocked that Davidson felt this way, saying, “You was banging a lot of hot chicks and you had a 10-inch penis.”
But Davidson pushed back. “You know, on paper, that sounds great… It’s embarrassing, ’cause, you know… It’s Hollywood. Everybody f–ks everyone. Why are they focusing on me? I’m not Glen Powell handsome. I’m just a dude who tells dick jokes that is a drug addict. It had nothing to do with comedy. But also, that stuff affects relationships … I don’t want to victimize myself in any way because I’m cool, but the sexualization of me — if that was a girl, there would be a march for it… Seriously. You’re just talking about my dick all day? People do that on the internet to like Sydney Sweeney or whoever, [but] there’s no radio hosts or news people … they don’t talk about girls like [that]. [This] was professional. It was pointed out in the street.”
He continued, “It just got to a point where I was… I got really tired of my whole career just being, like, my personal life. And living through that is sort of traumatic. Like, not to be lame, but like, it’s traumatic to live in your own crap all the time.”
For Davidson, the ongoing fixation became less of a joke and more of a burden, one he says made him feel reduced to a headline rather than recognized for his work.
