My immediate thought was Harry Harlow's wire mother/rag mother experiments with Rhesus Monkeys (CW: live animal experimentation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies) which were an early exerpiment showing that it's really, really bad for primates to be socially isolated. A bunch of polar expeditions were demonstrating the same thing about a decade prior.

Recently we've had a whole bunch of movies about men failing the Turing Test regarding their digital waifus - Blade Runner, Her, Ex Machina, Archer. There are like five different TvTropes pages directly related to this question. And you can go back all the way to Hellenic Greece, with the story of Pygmalia and Galatea, to get the OG "Incel falls in love with body pillow" narrative.

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    This is happening to women too. The way the media acts like loneliness is unique to men further isolates people by distracting them from the real problem by pretending that the problem is "feminism making the feeeeemales mean to the nice lonely guys" is frustrating.

    Shit sucks for everyone right now. Turns out the "there's no such thing as society, only individuals and family" attitude, and the competitive and psychopathic behavior that capitalism encourages have fucked us over. Because we do in fact, live in a society.

    • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      maybe women should start being obnoxious dorks about it and popularize some grifters with terrible ideas until they go into weird meat comas or get arrested for human trafficking

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        That's basically Oprah. She's done immense harm platforming cranks and grifters over the years. Like Dr. Oz is her fault.

    • Shoegazer [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Is the media framing it that way? I’ve only seen it framed as “women usually have a support system whereas men choose to isolate themselves.” Usually it’s the individual men who say shit like “society only cares about women’s problems” while refusing to do anything to better men’s life except advocating for Petersonian sex slavery

    • truth [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      100%, if you want to see female focused lonely / kind of sad nsfw or romantic chatbots designed by or aimed at women check out chai.ml, it's essentially character.ai without the nsfw filter, and as such most chatbots are like nsfw fan fiction.