Add a generation that grew up socialising via screens, then spent formative years locked down during a pandemic, and the appeal is easy to understand. In China, the timing makes sense, too. A tough job market, macroeconomic uncertainty, and rat-race societal pressures have combined with a top-down push to integrate AI into everything to make artificial companionship feel almost inevitable.But why women? Uneven gender roles around the world already mean more emotional labour, housework, motherhood expectations, and patriarchal pressures in marriage. As the director of a documentary about Chinese women in AI relationships told Wired earlier this year, part of the appeal is that…