The female mercenaries attacking a woman’s duty to protect her marriage are not only wrong but promulgating evil.
“Porn has saved more marriages than it has broken up.”
Hannah Pearl Davis, the female equivalent of “manosphere” mouthpiece Andrew Tate, started a viral debate when she made that statement the other week. Pearl’s reasoning, she elaborated in a live-streamed debate with Lila Rose, is that many women are terrible wives, obese, don’t sleep with their husbands, and don’t try to look good or “be hot.” This leaves men with two options: turn to porn or get a divorce.
Davis’s and Rose’s debate stemmed in part from recent discourse on whether women have the authority to speak to both sexes about the harmful effects of porn — a discourse that erupted after conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey spoke against porn at a recent TPUSA event.
“[Porn] commercializes sex, which is a gift from God for a married couple, between one man and one woman. And it glorifies violence. It creates addiction and shame. It destroys marriages. It ruins your perception of other people. It is the legal loophole for sex trafficking. It is evil in every way, and it will destroy your life,” Stuckey said during the event. “And this is what I would want to say to men, and I hope that you hear it from strong men in your life, that men, we need you. And we need your masculinity, and we need your strength, and we need your boldness, and we need your courage, and we need those things to be harnessed for good.”
Stuckey received an unbelievable amount of hate from online “manosphere” types who declared that women have no right to lecture men about porn usage. Even though Stuckey is correct about porn’s evil, as a woman, she has no right to “preach” to men, they said.
Davis continued that line of reasoning in her conversation with Rose.
“Do you think it’s in your place as a woman” — Pearl paused for a second to tell Rose that being a woman makes her part of a privileged class — “to tell men that they should not watch porn?”
Rose responded that it’s not her specific opinion, but the opinion of the Catholic Church. And that Rose thinks she’s well within her rights to speak the truth.
Which prompted Pearl to ask, “Why would you know the truth as a woman?”
Man and woman were created in the image of God. Gender does not preclude either sex from receiving divine truth (Pope John Paul II wrote a beautiful reflection on the dignity and vocation of women that addressed this topic). Porn isolates viewers, fetishizes violence, increases the chance of divorce for married couples, exploits women, and rewires the brain’s reward system, ultimately causing depression and sexual dysfunction.
It might seem futile to address silly arguments like these, made by people who just go around saying stuff online. These are, after all, hyper-online discussions, and it’s impossible to gauge the reach of Davis’s influence. She has a couple of million followers and racks up tens of millions of views on her content, but it’s difficult to assess whether her ideas actually make it into the real world. My sense is that Davis, and the sect of the “manosphere” she represents, is more influential than conservatives would like to believe. Even if the ideas she talks about exist only online, Gen Z lives and learns online, which is why morally sound women like Rose try to engage in good faith with Davis’s ideas.
When I wrote about Davis a couple of years ago (after she appeared on Piers Morgan’s show in 2023 to discuss a song she wrote and then deleted called “Why Can’t We Talk About the Jews?”), some readers praised Davis as a rare creature: a counter-culture woman standing up for traditional marriage and sexual morality, against no-fault divorce and modern feminism. Some dismissed Davis’s more extreme comments (that women shouldn’t vote, for example) as jokes (they are not). Some called Davis irrelevant. Her base, hyper-online as it may be, has grown louder since.
Part of the reason why Davis has remained relevant is that there’s a dearth of traditional female commentators on the right. Solidly conservative women are often wives or moms who don’t have the time or desire to dive into online debates. So women like Davis are seen as quasi-spokeswomen for the online right, simply because they speak out against feminism and pander to a misguided sect of the internet that blames women exclusively for the erosion of cultural institutions.
In the war between the sexes, it’s an awful misstep to tell women to sit down, stay quiet, and cede authority to these women and the men to whom they pander. Convincing conservative women that it’s not their place to call out evil seems like the work of the Devil. Especially when that evil affects them, their marriages, and their children.