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.

  • 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