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Perhaps the attention paid to the male loneliness crisis is due to the fact that it manifests as societal wide problems, whereas female loneliness just results in shut-ins posting on private tumblrs to a circle of cheerleaders waiting their turn at the podium.
To share my own experience, my own compatriots who fell into this insanity actually fell into such due to the harry potter fandom spaces, where they would go insane about how gay pederasty was morally pure compared to disgusting heterosexuality. Their real life end state manifestations is raging at the CCP for censoring their beloved boy love dramas and spamming chatgpt for increasingly explicit kpop slashfic, but the through line still exists. They have eschewed all heterosexual relationships, consigned themselves to a chaste nunnery dedicated to homosexual pedophilia, and find plenty of validation from adjacent groups cheerleading self-indulgence as liberation from the patriarchy.
The great awokening obviously broke many brains, and till my death I will point to elevatorgate as the crystallization of feminism+racism+mental issues in the social justice caucus, but it particularly affected unmoored young women who lacked real life reinforcement. Whether negative or positive reinforcement, the lack of real life consequences for life choices makes online communities easy to fall into and hard to escape once that becomes a 'community'. Men who crawl out of the porn and vidya pits could be threats, women just become the crazy cousin no one talks to anymore.
I would have never believed what you are describing if I didn’t see it happen to a friend in real time. Big gay pedo rape fanfic writer and all. This was a rather cute but just very shy and nerdy girl who explicitly flirted with me a couple times at the beginning of college but nothing ever happened and I think she went from kissless virgin with weird internet habits to full blown weirdo of exactly the type you are describing during the corona years after some sad family experiences and a lot of social isolation. Once in a while I get a sad “could I have cured her if I pursued her sexually” thought and suppress it.
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What is "elevatorgate"?
Elevatorgate was the Gamergate of the Atheist community. That either explains the whole thing perfectly or leaves you totally mystified, so I'll break it down a bit more.
You have a community. A woman in the community claims that the behavior of the men in the community is problematic, and what is needed is for the community to begin enforcing stringent new rules developed by social justice ideology. These rules contradict large portions of the community's existing norms, so people resist their imposition. The community rapidly polarizes into those who are on board with Social Justice ideology and those who are not, and social shunning and retaliation forces people to pick a side or have a side picked for them.
A short time later, the community that once existed is now a shell of its former self, if it exists at all.
I say "woman" above because the primary blast wave happened to coincide with a notable wave of Feminism, but this appears to be more or less an accident of history. It could be any identity group favored by social justice, and later often was, but in 2014-2015 it was mainly feminism driving the process. "Elevatorgate" was when the blastwave hit the Atheists. "Gamergate" was when it hit video game fans. "RequiresHate" was when it came for the fantasy/sci-fi authors community, "The Dickwolves Incident" for the Penny Arcade fandom; I don't know what they called it for the TTRPG designer forums. It came for most online communities sooner or later.
I dunno if there was a single crystalizing incident for TTRPG fandom as a whole, or even for individual forums.
RPGnet has a date that the moderators themselves advertise as turning from "the wild west" to intersectionality uber allies (usually mid-2004/2005ish), but there wasn't some big incident motivating that, just a more formalized ruleset that wasn't even especially biased, outside Darren McLennan, Curt, and a few other moderators having unofficial exceptions.
Same for conventions: things like banning people over pepes and ok symbols are pretty far downstream of everything else at GenCon, just like the White Male Terrorist writeups were downstream of far broader definitions of harassment becoming standardized or the nuTSR thing was very much a reaction to progressive politics becoming cost-of-entry. There's a lot of stuff that was the topic de jour in the early days: D&D's Oriental Adventures controversy in early D&D 4 days (probably 2007-2009ish?), various convention kerfluffles, CthulhuTech controversies...
That said, I'd largely left the fandom except to keep up with Morancy by the worst of it, so I may just have missed some.
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For a real life example, spend time browsing 4chan vs crystal cafe.
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Ah, you know Pausanias?
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Just as we're more concerned with female vulnerability due to men's physical aggression, I'd argue another big contributor to our concern about male loneliness is the fact that female aggression tends to manifest socially, particularly via ostracization of the target.
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Finished reading this and scrolled away before a little voice inside whispered "That all sounded so normal and obvious that it barely even registered."
Lord, have mercy.
Some of us are extremly online though. Try to imagine explaining every sentence to a normie.
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