The Loneliness Remedy: Community-Generated Commodification of Male Loneliness in the Manosphere

Sammanfattning

Keywords: manosphere, male loneliness, compensatory consumption, consumer responsibilization, netnography Purpose: The purpose of this study is to expand the understanding of how digital communities construct consumption as a collective remedy to affective social problems, examined through the case of male loneliness within the manosphere. Theoretical perspective: By synthesising three theoretical perspectives (commodity fetishism and disavowal, ritualized transformation, and neo-tribal status economies) this thesis introduces an integrated framework of the rites of self-commodification in order to gain new insights into how digital masculine communities mobilise consumption as a remedy for male isolation. Method: This qualitative netnographic study examined 48 TikTok videos and 45 Reddit threads alongside their associated comments. The research is grounded in a relativist ontology and social constructionist epistemology, and follows an abductive approach. Empirical Results: Findings indicate that male loneliness is recast as a measurable bodily deficit and routed into a transformation journey driven by perpetual optimization and consumption. This is reinforced by a communal structure of conditional belonging which ensures that this optimization process continuously expands, ensuring that resolution is never achieved. Conclusion: The study finds that consumption is constructed as a collective remedy to male isolation through a community-generated optimization spiral in which the community itself manufactures the deficit its prescribed products claim to repair, deferring resolution to sustain market and community engagement indefinitely.