After Intimacy? Feminine Intimacy and the Digital Containment System

This article introduces the digital containment system (DCS), a theoretical framework for understanding how intimacy is reorganized in datafied societies. Extending Bion’s notion of containment, the DCS comprises three interdependent layers: AI-based interactions that provide simulated empathy and co-regulation; social media publics that aggregate and validate affect; and algorithmic infrastructures that learn and normalize emotional patterns through feedback loops. Centering women’s experiences, the essay argues that these digital containers enable expressive repair and identity work while relocating emotional labour from interpersonal to technological systems. Declining marriage and fertility rates are thus read not as signs of moral decline, but as indications of a relational modernization lag, where emotional expectations outpace institutional adaptation. Intimacy, rather than disappearing, is being redistributed across human–machine–media assemblages.