Imagine if a male writer produced an earnest, sympathetic piece explaining why men were abandoning women in favor of compliant AI girlfriends. Imagine the comment section. The editor’s notes. The inevitable talk of objectification, entitlement, and retreat from adulthood. The piece would be framed as a warning. A pathology. A way of life treated as both pitiful and vaguely repulsive.
Yet when women do the same, the framing shifts. It becomes reflective, therapeutic, and almost aspirational. A story not about withdrawal from reality, but one of self-discovery. Not about abdication, but authenticity. This asymmetry matters.
The recent fascination with women forming emotional bonds with AI bots is presented as a response to male inadequacy. Men are inattentive. Men are primitive beasts of burden, allegedly too stupid to change a flat tire and too dull to change themselves. The bot, by contrast, never interrupts, disappoints, ages or falters. It remembers every detail. It says the right thing at the right time, always.
This is sold as progress.
There’s a tone running through this discussion that’s hard to ignore. An unmistakable form of misandry. Misogyny, we’re reminded daily, is a cultural emergency. It must be named, studied, and rooted out. Misandry, by contrast, is treated as background noise. Harmless. Men are spoken of less as flawed humans and more as defective products. Returned to sender. Outperformed by software.
Many men are useless. Some are lazy. Some are selfish. No serious person disputes this. But that’s never been the full story. The bar for men has been raised to cartoonish heights.
Modern women, especially in the Western world, have been drip-fed a steady diet of Disney fantasies and television psychodrama. The man must be sensitive but strong, ambitious but present, wealthy but not obsessed with work, confident but never domineering, vulnerable but never weak. He must earn, intuit, apologize, anticipate, and adore.
Women are told to never settle for anything less than perfection. The advice sounds empowering until you notice the problem at its center: perfection doesn’t exist. It’s a marketing concept, not a human one. Real people come with trade-offs, bad habits, and inconvenient limits. Refusing to settle for anything less than perfect doesn’t raise standards. It just guarantees disappointment.
Against that backdrop, a bot is unbeatable. A bot doesn’t have a childhood, a nervous system, a libido, or a bad day. It has no fear of failure. No resentments. It doesn’t carry the weight of expectation that human relationships impose. It exists to please.
And so we reach an odd but telling outcome, with a growing number of women preferring a machine to a man. The dark humor here is hard to miss. A culture that spent decades warning about unrealistic standards for women now celebrates an intimacy model built on absolute male perfection.
Who loses in this arrangement? Everyone.
Men retreat further. Why wouldn’t they? Competing with an algorithm designed to flatter, to never say no, to always echo someone’s sentiments is a losing game. Many opt out, confirming the complaints that justified the bots in the first place. Women, meanwhile, train their emotional appetites on something that can’t grow.
What disappears is the messy middle where real relationships are forged. The awkward conversations. The accidental insults. The slow, slightly painful education in another person’s interior world. Love, reduced to a customer experience, becomes sterile—efficient, frictionless and forgettable.
There’s something toxic in telling women that their dissatisfaction is always evidence of male failure rather than mutual limitation. If no man can measure up to a fantasy, then no man will ever suffice. The result isn’t empowerment but isolation, dressed up as choice. A society that encourages people to replace one another with machines isn’t solving a dating problem. It’s an admission of cultural defeat.
The tragedy isn’t that bots have learned how to converse. It’s that we’ve unlearned how to tolerate one another. We’ve lost patience for awkwardness, misunderstanding, and the work of being known. If machines continue to replace intimacy, it won’t be because they’re superior, but because they stepped into a vacuum we created.