It pains me to say this, but women are more susceptible to social contagion. And I think of ME/LC (and pooning out) as culture-bound syndromes that spread through social contagion.
Before the internet clusters of culture-bound syndromes were generally confined to specific geographical areas or social strata and were usually self limiting. What we’re seeing now are the same old cultural illnesses, but on a larger scale, and it isn’t self limiting. It’s looking pretty bleak tbh.
I blame the welfare state. Women only enter these states of learned helplessness when they have someone to take care of them. Some are able to snag a husband, universally making sure he's good and trapped, preferably with a kid, before they decide to take to their beds forever. Those types have always existed to some extent. But the Victorias, who have no patron, can only exist in a place with dem programs making sure that they can be permanently tired.
You know, I'm going to edit this to add another reason.
The women who do this, nearly universally, husband or not, came from girls who were not expected to contribute to household operations.
Instead, they were told to focus on artistic or expressive pursuits, and not dirty their hands with the dishes or the mopping or the laundry. Keep your eyes on your gymnastics, your ballet, your violin, your engineering projects. Whatever it was.
Having everything else taken off your plate so you can engage with the activities you're passionate about...indulgent parents love to do this, as do the ones who love to keep up with the Joneses, because these kids inevitably do go further than they otherwise would have in their extracurricular interests.
And then they become failures to thrive, because every young adult (even those who become ballerinas and concert violinists and engineers) needs to spend a huge amount of life doing boring maintenance tasks, managing their own schedule, and so on.
So many of the ME/CFS crowd are people who, for decades, always had the sensation of growth and development in their areas of passion, and then a year or two of attempting to grow up, followed by collapse. Once the maintenance tasks of life are no longer novel, interesting "I'm adulting, ha ha!" accomplishments, they can't maintain interest. They were never taught that you have duties to your household, to other people. They were told their only duty was to their own nascent potential.