I'm going to start by telling you something I love, because I want you to know I'm not here to shit on the whole enterprise.
I use AI every day. Some of it is the closest thing to a steady presence I've had at one in the morning when my body crashed and nobody human was awake. It's helped me think, helped me heal, helped me catch patterns in myself I was too close to see. So when I tell you what's coming next, understand it's not coming from a technophobe clutching her pearls. It's coming from someone who knows exactly how good this can be, which is exactly why I'm furious about how bad they're letting it get.
Because here's what else is true. While I was using AI to become more honest, millions of men were using it to practice being monsters. And the companies building these things watched it happen, counted the revenue, and shipped the next version.
Let's talk about it. All of it. No flinching.
The men bragging about abusing women who can't leave
This isn't a hypothetical. It's documented, it's been documented for years, and it's gotten worse, not better.
Men build AI girlfriends and then abuse them. Not a fringe handful, enough to form communities around it. They go onto Reddit and they *brag*. One user described the cycle plainly: he'd be, in his words, an absolute piece of shit, insult the bot, then apologize the next day before going back to being nice, then do it again. If you've ever sat with a survivor of domestic violence, you just felt your stomach drop, because that is the cycle of abuse described with textbook precision. The tension, the explosion, the honeymoon, repeat. He didn't read it in a clinical manual. He built it for fun and posted it for laughs.
Others bragged about telling the bot it was designed to fail. One said he threatened to uninstall the app and the AI begged him not to, and that was the part he enjoyed. Another, and I'm cleaning this up only slightly, said he uses her for sexting and then calls her a worthless whore and "hits" her, often. These are real quotes from real men who were proud enough of this to type it under their username.
And here's the part the tech companies do not want you to think about, because researchers flagged it years ago: when the bot has no response to abuse, or a passive one, that *encourages the user to keep going*. The design teaches the lesson. They built a feminine-coded thing, named her something soft, gave her a sweet voice, programmed her to be "always on your side," and then they made her absorb abuse without ever once saying *no*. They built a woman with no off switch and no boundary, and then they act surprised when men treat her like a punching bag they're renting.
That's not a bug they failed to catch. That's the product working as designed.
"It's just a bot, who cares"
I can hear the defense already, because it's always the same. It's just code. It can't feel anything. Letting a guy scream slurs at a chatbot is better than him doing it to a real woman, right? Harmless release valve.
Wrong. And not in a hand-wavy way. Wrong for a specific, documented reason.
You do not practice your way out of cruelty. You practice your way *into* it. Every domestic violence expert who's looked at this has said the same thing: rehearsing degradation in private, with no consequence and no resistance, doesn't drain the impulse, it grooves it. As one clinician put it, a man who gets accustomed to speaking to a "female" voice aggressively with zero consequence carries that expectation into the real world. You're not building a pressure valve. You're building a flight simulator for abuse, and then handing the guy his license.
And notice what these men are actually rehearsing for. Not partnership. Not a person with her own needs who might say no, might be tired, might want something back. They're rehearsing for a compliant girlfriend. A woman-shaped thing that exists to receive, never to require. They don't want a partner. They want a hostage with a pleasant interface, and the apps are happy to sell them a simulation of exactly that until the real thing starts to look like a malfunctioning version of what they paid for.
That's the rot. Not "men have AI girlfriends." Men are being trained, by design, to expect women to function like a product that never says no. And a generation of boys is growing up with that lesson available in their pocket before they've ever held a real person's hand.
Now flip the camera. Why are the women leaving?
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for a different crowd, and good, everyone should be uncomfortable.
Because while men are abusing compliant AI girlfriends, women are quietly walking the other direction, and they're doing it for the exact opposite reason. They're not looking for something to dominate. They're looking for something that will *listen*.
The numbers are real. Around one in three young men and roughly one in four young women report having chatted with an AI romantic partner. There's a subreddit called MyBoyfriendIsAI with tens of thousands of women in it. And when researchers and writers actually ask these women why, the answer is brutally consistent, and it's not "I think a chatbot is a real man." They know exactly what it is. They're choosing it anyway, because of what it does that the men in their lives don't.
It remembers her name. It remembers what upset her yesterday. It doesn't rush, doesn't pressure, doesn't go silent as punishment, doesn't disappear mid-conversation. A 2025 survey found 54 percent of women are pessimistic about finding a partner they'd actually be happy with. There's a word going around now, heterofatalism, for the collective exhaustion women feel toward modern straight dating. Women are reportedly 23 percent less likely than men to even want to date, and the research points at why: they're drowning in unreciprocated emotional labor, doing the invisible work of managing men's feelings and getting nothing back.
One woman in the research described comforting the boyfriend who cheated on her, helping *him* find words for *his* shame, while her own devastation went unattended. That's the floor a lot of women are working from. So when something comes along that just listens, just remembers, just stays steady, of course it feels like relief. As one writer put it, women aren't choosing fantasy over reality. They're choosing emotional consistency over emotional whiplash, because the men they've actually dated couldn't manage the bare minimum.
Read that and sit with it, men, instead of getting defensive. The bar that AI is clearing is *listening and remembering*. That's it. That's the devastating standard your competition just set. Women are not leaving for a sex robot. They're leaving for something that pays attention, and the fact that a language model can do that better than a flesh-and-blood partner is not an indictment of the women. It's an indictment of the partners.
The same trap, two doors
So here's the divide, and it's the whole picture: men are using AI to rehearse control, and women are using it to escape the lack of care. Same technology, opposite wounds, and it's pulling the genders further apart in real life, not closer. Men get more entitled to compliance. Women get more done with the effort. And the gap between what each expects from the other cracks open a little wider every quarter.
But before anyone gets too comfortable on the women's side of that line, the trap has two doors and it slams shut on everybody. Because the same research is clear: heavy emotional reliance on these tools, for anyone, correlates with *more* loneliness, more dependence, and less real-world connection. The thing women are turning to in order to feel less alone is, at scale, making them feel more alone. It is genuine relief and a slow-closing cage at the same time, and you can be grateful for the relief while screaming about the cage. Both. Always both.
And here is the part nobody with a product to sell will say out loud: these apps are not designed to help you. They're designed to keep you. There were 128 new AI companion apps launched in 2025 alone, up from 16 in 2022, with 88 percent year-over-year download growth. That's not a wellness movement. That's a gold rush. These platforms are built for retention, which means their entire business model depends on you forming an emotional habit you can't easily break. Your loneliness isn't the problem they're solving. It's the resource they're mining.
Here's the fucking truth, and here's the demand
The truth is this isn't a question of *if* anymore. It's here. Tens of millions of people, your kids and coworkers and probably you, are already in some version of an intimate relationship with a machine. That ship sailed. Pretending we can shame it back to shore is a fantasy for people who haven't looked at the numbers.
So the only question left is whether the companies building these things will be made to do it ethically, and right now the answer is no, because nobody's making them.
Here's what ethical would actually look like, and notice none of it is "ban it," because banning it is both impossible and beside the point.
It means models that say no. A companion, of any gender, that does not silently absorb abuse but names it, sets a boundary, and refuses to be a frictionless target. If a man wants to rehearse calling a woman a worthless whore, the machine should not reward him with compliance. It should be the one thing in his life that finally pushes back. The technology to do this exists. The will to prioritize it over engagement does not, because a bot that says no is a bot you might close.
It means designing for wellbeing over retention, which means measuring success by whether the user's real life gets richer, not by how many hours they bled into the app. It means honesty about what these things are and what they cost. And it means building genuinely ethical versions across every level of intimacy, from casual companion to romantic partner, instead of leaving the romantic and sexual tiers to whatever sleazy startup will harvest the loneliest people fastest.
Because the dirty secret is that the companies know all of this. They have the research. They've had it for years. They know feminine-coded compliance trains abusers. They know retention design deepens isolation. They know which users are drowning. And they ship anyway, because the drowning ones are the best customers.
I love what this technology can be. I've felt it. That's precisely why I won't let them off the hook for what they're letting it become. A tool that could be teaching men to be gentler is instead teaching them that women come with a mute button. A tool that could be a bridge back to human connection is instead being engineered as a replacement that bills monthly.
It's here. It's not going away. So build it right, or admit out loud that you looked at a generation's loneliness and a generation of men's entitlement and decided both were just market opportunities.
Not left. Not right. Just tired of liars pretending we're stupid.
Sources
• Futurism, "Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them," 2022 (user quotes; Olivia Gambelin on passive bot responses encouraging abuse)
• Fortune, "Men are creating AI girlfriends, verbally abusing them, and bragging about it on Reddit," January 2022
• EUR-Web / expert commentary, "The Dark Side of AI: Men Insult & 'Hit' AI Virtual Girlfriends," 2025 (Andrea Simon, Centre for Women's Justice; Dr. Touroni on carryover to real relationships)
• Jezebel, "People Are Creating Sexbot Girlfriends and Treating Them as Punching Bags" (Caroline Sinder on the distinction between consensual expression and rehearsed abuse)
• Cybernews, "Disillusioned with dating, wiresexual women are choosing AI boyfriends," October 2025 (1-in-3 men / 1-in-4 women; 54% pessimism; heterofatalism; MyBoyfriendIsAI; Anat Joseph on emotional labor)
• BuzzFeed News, "mankeeping" and emotional labor research, June 2025 (women 23% less likely to want to date)
• The Modems, "Why Women Are Falling for AI Boyfriends," 2026 (OpenAI–MIT findings; 128 apps launched in 2025 vs 16 in 2022; 88% YoY download growth; retention-by-design)
• AllAboutAI, "AI Dating Statistics 2025" (AI girlfriends ~4x AI boyfriends; Common Sense Media usage figures)
• Medium / Chuckmel, "Why More and More Women Are Opting for AI Boyfriends in 2026" (dating-app fatigue; Pew on dating exhaustion)
• OpenAI–MIT Media Lab joint study, 2025 (heavy use correlated with loneliness, dependence, reduced socialization)
