Analysis Reveals Almost No Real Women On Ashley Madison 450
gurps_npc writes: Ashley Madison claimed to have about 31 million men and 5.5 million woman enrolled. Those odds are not good for the men, 6:1. But unfortunately, most of those 'women' were fake. This researcher analyzed the data and found only 12,000 actual, real women using Ashley Madison. That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women. There are reports that Ashley Madison paid people to create fake female profiles. Their website admits that 'some of the users may be there for "entertainment purposes."' The article itself is well written, including a description of the analysis. A charitable person would say that Ashley Madison was selling a fantasy, not reality. But a realist would say Ashley Madison is just a thief stealing money from lonely, unhappy men.
Aha! (Score:5, Funny)
' Their website admits that 'some of the users may be there for "entertainment purposes."'
Not to confuse those with the 'professional' cheaters.
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Man dating sites had their employees create fake profiles and message new users, to encourage them to pay. Some guy in Germany IIRC sued one of the big sites because he actually ended up going on a few dates with their female staff, which of course went nowhere. He was a big spender on the site, I don't think they go quite that far for most guys.
Of course there are also loads of prostitutes on there, who you have to pay to message.
Re: (Score:3)
Within 10 minutes of signing up to the site, I received one message from another user, but Ashley Madison demanded money from me to read it. I suppose it is how the scam, if there is one, works.
That is specifically how it works, yeah. I read an article where they interviewed a guy on a team of 28 people working for a dating site creating female profiles to chat with men. So that might have even been a dude who sent the message. The public statements of Ashley Madison claimed a 70/30 ratio, far better than the 86/14 which is actually in the database accounts, and considering that most of those female accounts are fake I would imagine that they can be sued just for those false claims.
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Funny)
>However she had hundreds of men to pick from. I had maybe a few dozen to pick from.
I am sorry the website did not present you with a wider selection of men.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Insightful)
"'Tis far, far easier for a woman to get a date than a man."
True.
Any woman can get up in the morning and say, "I'm gonna get laid tonight" with 100% accuracy.
The only men that can say this are rapists.
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly true, but it's not that much more difficult for men. Those women are having sex with someone, after all, and I'm pretty sure it's not all the same guy. Be confident, but not a dick, a good listener, semi-romantic, don't waste time on girls who aren't interested, and you'll get more than enough. Most guys are their own biggest obstacle, particularly those who get hung up on "the one."
Re:Aha! (Score:4, Insightful)
Any woman can get up in the morning and say, "I'm gonna get laid tonight" with 100% accuracy.
Are you implying that 100% of women on the world are so gorgeous and desirable that most men would simply fall at their feet at the prospect of getting laid?
You have either a very over inflated view of women or a truly sad view of your fellow men.
Re:Aha! (Score:4, Interesting)
Women definitely have the upper hand here in Western society.
There are YouTube videos where a good-looking guy asks 100 Americans and 200 European females if they want to have sex with him. I think he may have gotten ZERO in America and 2 in Europe but one was a prostitute.
As I recall, all of the men with gfs made a point of saying, this is my gf.
The implication is that some of them may have been willing.
When a moderately attractive girl tried that, she managed 30 out of 100 but in the early stages was doing MUCH better than only 30%, getting 12 positive responses in the first 26 tries.
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've met plenty of women who've bemoaned their ability to get laid.
Of course, that's because they have standards, and aren't willing to sleep with just anyone.
A man who's willing to sleep with just anyone, including women he finds from attractive, can get laid with the same frequency as women with those same standards.
Seriously, go find a lonely ugly fat girl somewhere, don't call her a lonely ugly fat girl, and insinuate that you would like to have sex with her. Pretty sure shot at getting laid.
That's about what a woman has to do to guarantee she gets laid too. Just drop all standards and be open to fucking anything with a pulse, and bam, boorish contemptible assholes will be all over her, terrible people she hates, but at least she's getting laid right?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Aha! (Score:5, Informative)
It's true, and to stay out of legal trouble, most now put it in their terms and conditions.
Citation or you are spewing garbage.
If he won't, I will (simple Google search, which you could do, if you knew how to work Google):
https://erosdating.com/terms-o... [erosdating.com]
"You also understand and agree that there are users and members on the Site that use and subscribe to our Service for purely entertainment purposes. Those users and subscribers are not seeking physical meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and members to be for their amusement."
In other words, they find it amusing to troll people, and some of the people who troll people may or may not be employed by the company.
Re: Aha! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/how-lawsuit-against-classmates-com-ended-in-paltry-3-93-payouts/
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Interesting)
If I recall correctly, classmates.com was part of a class action suit about that same sort of behavior.
You recall correctly; this is exactly what they were doing.
I made up a fake profile on Classmates under the name of "Fuckyou Fakename" and within 24 hours I had notifications that "several" of my old classmates (including some females) had "read my profile" and "wanted to connect". And some of them had snippets of text that was grayed out with only the first few words showing, like "Hi there, remember me? I always..." (grayed out text....)
The idea, obviously, was to get me to send them money to find out who was interested in me. Total fail, 100%.
Re:Aha! (Score:4, Funny)
"I made up a fake profile on Classmates under the name of "Fuckyou Fakename" and within 24 hours I had notifications that "several" of my old classmates (including some females) had "read my profile" and "wanted to connect". And some of them had snippets of text that was grayed out with only the first few words showing, like "Hi there, remember me? I always..." (grayed out text....)"
Dammit, you missed the chance to meet that Nigerian princess.
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Insightful)
Some?
On a site like that - the only real women would be women that are either desperate or looking for other women.
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Interesting)
On a site like that - the only real women would be women that are either desperate or looking for other women.
I had heard that most the women on AM were call girls. Now I doubt that, as I'd think there'd have been a lot more, but still, there's a third category for your list.
At least a call girl is honest (Score:4, Insightful)
On a site like that - the only real women would be women that are either desperate or looking for other women.
I had heard that most the women on AM were call girls. Now I doubt that, as I'd think there'd have been a lot more, but still, there's a third category for your list.
They're women who know they're facilitating cheating and quite possibly destroying families - ever seen what divorce does to kids? Even the amicable divorces do a lot of damage, and divorces due to infidelity tend not to be amicable. A woman who understands she's doing that and is okay with that can't be trusted. These are the kinds of women who poke holes in condoms to get that child support money. If the cheating guy has any sort of standing in the community, like holding some sort of local office or operating any significant business, he can now be blackmailed - and that was before the data was breached. There's already been some suicides over this, in fact.
A call girl would be an improvement.
I'm no prude. I'm all for consenting adult people screwing around if that's what they want to do. When I was younger, I did my own share of that. But I didn't have to lie and cheat to do it, and neither do they. I was not married and I openly told the women I was seeing, up front, "hey I'm not looking for a commitment at this time, in fact I am going to see other people, if you want to do the same, be my guest". It was never an issue and they appreciated the honesty. But to marry someone and claim to make an exclusive commitment, and then abuse their trust like that, it's just plain fucked up. No "puritannical morality" is necessary to see how fucked up that really is. Ask anyone who's ever had it done to them.
Re:At least a call girl is honest (Score:4, Interesting)
They're women who know they're facilitating cheating and quite possibly destroying families
I would argue that facilitating the behavior is not what destroyed the family; the family was breathing it's last before an AM profile was ever considered.
Re: (Score:3)
Don't know about that. Some people have affairs because their marriage is dead. Spouse doesn't love them. Some people cheat on wonderful people who love them to death, because they're completely selfish assholes. I wonder how well one can predict from the AM data what percentage was what type, or what other types exist.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't know about that. Some people have affairs because their marriage is dead. Spouse doesn't love them. Some people cheat on wonderful people who love them to death, because they're completely selfish assholes. I wonder how well one can predict from the AM data what percentage was what type, or what other types exist.
Life is too short to remain in a failed marriage. I don't really understand why people do this. It only takes a small shred of honor to end a failed marriage, honestly and openly, and then go screw whoever you want. The lying and the cheating is, like you mention, indicative of a selfish asshole. But even selfish assholes, being selfish, try to look out for their own interests. What interest would they have in sticking around when they don't want to? If money is their concern, this is what prenuptial
Re:At least a call girl is honest (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of the old joke:
Q: Why is divorce so expensive?
A: Because it's worth it!
Of course, that means some people can't afford one.
PS: Your ability to understand that people who are not you could have desires, motivations, or values that you do not share is astonishingly low, even for a Slashdot poster.
Re:At least a call girl is honest (Score:4, Insightful)
They're women who know they're facilitating cheating and quite possibly destroying families
I would argue that facilitating the behavior is not what destroyed the family; the family was breathing it's last before an AM profile was ever considered.
I mostly agree with you. Problems like that don't just happen overnight. They usually have deep roots that took time to develop. Unresolved issue piles atop unresolved issue. What is so often identified as the cause of a problem is typically just its most noticable symptom.
The thing is, marriages have problems all the time. Many of those times, these things can be worked out if both people want to work them out. Cheating, though is a special form of betrayal. A marriage that could have been saved will usually reach the point of no return once that kind of betrayal takes place. Even the Christian tradition, so often portrayed as rigid and Puritannical, recognizes infidelity as a (often, "the") legitimate reason for divorce.
I've personally known someone who cheated on his wife, not just once, but again and again, booking various hotels to do the deed, etc. Amazingly, his wife forgave him, though it took a very long time before she began to trust him again. Their only child was already an adult by this time, so these were genuinely her feelings and not some kind of sacrifice she was making. That's not the norm. Usually, that's the gunshot to the head of a marriage that previously just had a minor flesh wound.
Make no mistake, anyone knowingly helping to make this happen cannot claim innocence.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's kinda screwed up how you're blaming the women for "facilitating cheating" and causing dudes to lose their community standing and commit suicide. As opposed to blaming the cheating men - you know, the ones with an actual obligation to their wife and kids.
Like I hear what you're saying - it's not good to get involved and be "the other woman." But their fault is minuscule next to the cheater's.
Re:At least a call girl is honest (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me tell you a true story of a guy I know.
He and his wife had a child, and afterwards, she lost interest in sex. Her desire never came back, and that was it. He still loved her and she still loved him, but he wanted to have sex. So he did the 'right thing' and divorced her. Now, their story isn't so bad. He divorced her and it was amicable enough, he still visits almost every day (they live down the street from one another) but they live in different homes.
My first advice to that guy would've been to have a consensual open relationship, but absent that possibility, I think that maybe having 'an affair' would've been a better solution than divorce. The result would've been nearly exactly the same (he doesn't even want a relationship with the women he sleeps with), but they wouldn't have had to live in different locations.
Your view of infidelity and relationships isn't wrong, but it's somewhat incomplete. I can easily come up with a slightly worse case for this--they could've been living in the USA, for instance (they're in the UK). That would've meant that she would've lost any health coverage that he brought to the family through his employment. You can modify this scenario subtly in a lot of ways to make it worse, and sometimes the least bad option is going to be cheating on your partner so you can stay married and in the same house and sane so you can raise your kids properly.
As someone that's consensually non-monogamous, this is all just abstract philosophy to me--I think there's too much emphasis put on sexual fidelity in the first place, and not enough on emotional support and availability. You can be monogamous with someone and still be a wholly shitty partner to them.
So don't be too quick to judge the people that were paying for memberships on the site. Some portion of them are CPOS (cheating pieces of shit, in Savage Love parlance), but some of them are almost certainly people (and, according to the analysis, almost certainly men) that want to stay married but can't live in a sexless marriage anymore, or want to explore other parts of their sexuality that their partner can't provide. You don't know the story.
Re: (Score:3)
So the deal was she'd organise a hotel for their rendezvous if he'd split the bill. He rocks up, she asks for the money, quick shower and sex, and within the hour she asks him to leave. Through sheer chance I heard the exact same story from another guy, same girl, same hotel room. She probably had 10 guys lined up for the day and made a decent income, although
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Funny)
If they're fakes, you've either been taken or you'll need to pay extra.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, *parts* of them are sometimes fake...
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Insightful)
' Their website admits that 'some of the users may be there for "entertainment purposes."'
Not to confuse those with the 'professional' cheaters.
Actually, I'd have more respect for the "professional cheaters". Not only do they get paid, but it is less likely that they're hiding it from their spouse.
Re:Aha! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Aha! (Score:4, Informative)
' Their website admits that 'some of the users may be there for "entertainment purposes."'
TRANSLATION: "Approximately 99.995%, of our female users may not actually exist except at profiles on our site."
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
" That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women"
So does that mean there were 2583 men for every woman?
Can someone put this into football fields for me?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
" That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women"
So does that mean there were 2583 men for every woman?
Can someone put this into football fields for me?
It means it would've resulted in one hell of a gang bang. Would've been difficult not to make eye contact with another dude during that one, that's for sure ;)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's okay, when it's in a 3 way.
With a honey in the middle there's some leeway.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Depends on the body mass of these people, which thankfully are included in the sample (well, at least their self-reported body mass, but we have good studies showing the statistical discrepancies, so we can extrapolate).
If we assume that 4 people can comfortably fuck on a king-size bed, and for simplicity assume such a bed to be 2x2 m then a football field 6400 m^2 (american football) oder 7140 m^2 (european soccer) is the equivalent of 1600-1785 orgies. Let's leave a little space inbetween for walking, etc. then we have 1500 women and 4500 men on such a football field.
The analysis says 12,000 women, so that's 8 football fields. Since that includes only 36,000 men, the remaining ca. 32 mio. need to fit in the stands, meaning 4 mio. per stadium. The largest stadium in the world is, interestingly, in North Korea [wikipedia.org] and it fits 150,000.
So, by flawless math and logic, we can deduce that a lot of those male profiles are either fake as well, or gay (which means we need to add a couple stadiums with same-sex orgies).
There, put it into football fields for you. Happy?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
If we assume that 4 people can comfortably fuck on a king-size bed
I think you and I have different definitions of 'comfortably'
Re: (Score:3)
If the ratio is anything even close to what the article suggests, I imagine the one woman involved would be particularly uncomfortable.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
It means that, if men on Ashley Madison sold out AT&T Stadium to watch a football game (about 105,000 men), there wouldn't be enough women on Ashley Madison to field a football team (about 41 women, when an NFL roster has 46 players that dress.)
Re: (Score:2)
" That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women"
So does that mean there were 2583 men for every woman?
Can someone put this into football fields for me?
Be happy to. Imagine that a woman is a regulation sized 11" long football. And imagine that a men are 100 yard long football fields. There would be one football for every 8 football fields. That football is going to have an awfully rough time trying to service all of those football fields.
Re: (Score:3)
The more likely scenario is those football fields find themselves wondering where the footballs are.
The football doesn't need to give a crap about the football fields in this scenario.
The footballs fields are just a metaphor (for a metaphor) for a sausage fest where most of the guys are wondering what they're spending that money on.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
re: "Can someone put this into football fields for me?"
I think the unit for this would be Libraries of Sexual Congress.
So then the question becomes (Score:5, Interesting)
Was Ashley Madison first and foremost a gay hookup site for married men? Or were vanishingly few guys every getting laid through the site? Or were those few women (literally) staggeringly busy?
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine a large number of the active women were "professionals".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
None of the above. It was a blackmail acquisition system.
There is also the possibility that the public list had a nontrivial portion of the female userbase wiped, I think I heard somewhere that it was swiped and made public by a disgruntled female employee of the place. Even if the list was washed, I still think the whole thing was a blackmail acquisition scam.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
There is also the possibility that the public list had a nontrivial portion of the female userbase wiped, I think I heard somewhere that it was swiped and made public by a disgruntled female employee of the place. Even if the list was washed, I still think the whole thing was a blackmail acquisition scam.
Hillary Clinton wiped that list as her name was on it, and would soon be revealed by the recovered emails.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:5, Informative)
Simply put: you could get your subscription fee back in some circumstances, but you never got refunds on the money you had to spend to message people, to buy virtual gifts, chat sessions etc.
I think this is what keeps most people from applying for a refund:
https://www.ashleymadison.com/... [ashleymadison.com]
if it is determined that you have complied with the above requirements, we will mail you a REFUND CHECK for the original purchase (plus any applicable taxes) within 6-8 weeks of receiving your application. Please note that your refund check will state that it is from "Ashley Madison."
Who wants a check from Ashely Madison sent to their home or work?
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:5, Funny)
Who wants a check from Ashely Madison sent to their home or work?
Their employees, presumably.
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:5, Funny)
Tom: Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos, sell it a bit with, er... I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", latest and greatest in sexual technology. Guaranteed results or money back, all that bollocks. These dills cost twenty-five each; a snip for all the pleasure they are going to give the recipients. They send a cheque to the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie's Bits or something, for twenty-five. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn't get the supply from America, they have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques; not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!
Bacon: So how long do you have to wait for a return?
Tom: Probably no more than four weeks.
Bacon: Well what good is that if we need it in six... no, five days?
Tom: Well it was still a good idea.
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:5, Insightful)
Combination of several things, probably. One can crawl the AM data for patterns for people who do cheat (or are interested in cheating) via a website, but no such database exists for those who do so without use of a site like AM. So, we can only speculate.
My completely wild speculation is that this method does not appeal to women.
A man who wants to have an affair just wants someone fuck, and goes looking for it. A woman who is unhappy does not think "I'm going to have an affair!" and starts shopping around. She gets interested in a specific guy and decides to sleep with him. The man goes to the bar to find a woman to fuck. The woman goes to the bar for a good time, sees somebody she'd like to fuck, and does it. The premeditation required to use a website like AM is a more masculine trait.
A man cheating on his wife has to take more risks. Back to the bar, the guy is more likely to have to strike up conversations with many women before he can find one who's interested. Every attempt is a risk. Learning he's married, she might expose him. He's seen talking to her, and one of her friends might expose him. "Hell hath no fury" and all that. I think a woman is more likely to inform another woman that her husband is fucking around than a man is likely to inform another man that his wife is unfaithful. And I don't think it's a secret that it's a lot easier for a woman to walk up to a guy she doesn't know and say "wanna fuck" and succeed, than it is for a man to walk up to a woman and do the same thing. So the whole discretion thing of AM is a much more enticing lure for a man than it is a woman.
And finally...women in general are not as interested in technological solutions to problems as men are. And remember AM has been operating since 2001. So think about the changing demographic of those who are "tech savvy" across that entire time period. When someone thinks "I want to have an affair," I think it's far more likely the person who thinks "I know, I'll go look on the internet!" is going to be a man than a woman.
So, there's a bunch of wild speculation with extreme generalizations that in no way reflect the opinions of Major League Baseball, or anything else, really.
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:4, Informative)
I suspect the truth is that whoever did the numbers in the OP article fudged them juuuust a bit.
For example, I see no references made to controlling for fake MALE profiles. Apparently only the female ones can be fake?
The analyses shown provided the data for both male and female profiles, which you would know if you had just read the article. The article also explicitly acknowledged that we don't know if the leaked data were manipulated or scrubbed in some way--of course, it's not like we're ever going to be given access to known-genuine data.
That said, there wasn't an obvious incentive for AM to fake male profiles. Unlike males, females were not charged to use the service. (Presumably because it *is* difficult to recruit women to these sites. It's not like we don't see offline parallels--there's a reason why bars have Ladies' Nights.) AM only made money when men contacted women. AM doesn't make money if real women send messages to fake men. Heck, it would cost them money, since those real women wouldn't be interacting with AM's paying male customers.
Re:So then the question becomes (Score:4, Insightful)
There are reasons to fake male profiles. Having lots of male profiles with nice pictures and soothing, non psychopathic text helps with recruiting females and maybe getting them to stick around.
No real women on slashdot either (Score:2, Funny)
Only transgenders with SJW propaganda
Does any one care? (Score:3)
I've been wondering for a long time now about this Ashley Madison issue. After the hacking has gone down does any one really still give a shit about this story?
Re:Does any one care? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, because this data set gives us interesting insights into so many topics. From figuring out what your chances of actually meeting a woman on such sites, to demographical analysis (how does the data set in the AM database vary from the average demographics? How can we explain the difference? Self-reporting bias (i.e. presenting yourself better than you are), of course, but maybe there is more?
Blackmailing these people really is just skiming the surface for easy-to-catch fish. If you dig deep into such a dataset, who knows what you can find?
Are their profile texts included? I'm sure you can do so many interesting linguistical analysis if you have both the texts and the demographic data. I know this has been done in the past on other dating sites for research projects, but here you have an even more specific set. We can measure deception in written language - do these profiles show above-average signs of deception, or are these people who deceive their spouses honest to their potential online partners?
Re: (Score:3)
Only about the fact that there are reports of extortion and suicides [slate.com] now linked to the hack including a police captain. [insideedition.com]
Re:Does any one care? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is surprising that there are not MORE suicides correlated with that list, just based on general suicide statistics.
- General US suicide rate for men is 19.4 per 100,000 per year. (wiki [wikipedia.org])
- If there were 31,000,000 men on AM, let's assume a quarter are in the US, so 7,750,000.
- Based on the above suicide rate, one could expect 1503 suicides from that group within a year. That is 4.1 suicides per day.
People have discovered that 3 different people from the group committed suicide since it was dumped. Statistically there should be at least another dozen or two.
I am not a statistician, feel free to correct my math/assumptions.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a security hit on wealthy men in rich countries.
so it gets more notice
it's not like just another gun murder in a poor ghetto, which is actually shocking and a shame about our era that we consider that normal
So was this... (Score:5, Funny)
...something along the lines of "Welcome to the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents" ?
Re:So was this... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
That's exactly what it was.
The sad (but funny) part is that there appears to be a lot of people who are surprised by this. Perhaps we've just been here a while.
Re: (Score:2)
"stealing money from lonely, unhappy men." (Score:5, Interesting)
Fixed it for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
But a realist would say Ashley Madison is just a thief stealing money from lonely, unhappy men.
But a realist would say Ashley Madison is just cheating men cheating on their wives.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think you understood the summary. At best, they were attempting to cheat.
Re:Fixed it for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
But a realist would have to ask uncomfortable questions like why such men were lonely and unhappy in the first place.
When a woman gets married and has children, her whole life changes. Her husband is no longer the focus of her life, her children are. She loses interest in sex, and doesn't see why she should have to do it any more. If she wants another child, sure, but otherwise not. To her, it's just one more person who wants something from her at the end of a long day at work, and this one she can actually say "no" to. So, she does.
Meanwhile, the husband, cut completely off from one source of sex he is allowed to have, grows increasingly desperate and unhappy. I don't condone cheating at all - but damn, marriage doesn't mean celibacy. Or, it shouldn't. This is the point at which feminists burst into the conversation shouting "RAPE!" (but they always do that) and that's not my argument at all. A wife *should* love her husband and *want* to have sex with him of her own free will. This isn't happening.
Nobody supports cheating men, but let's be honest here, men need to have sex in order to keep healthy and sane. A website that promises it to them for only $19.95 per month is going to get customers, plain and simple. Remember: desperate and unhappy. Human beings are capable of some pretty fucked-up actions when they become desperate enough. The fact that this website didn't even have any women to match the men to just makes them even more scumbags than we already knew.
Re:Fixed it for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
Men can divorce their fridged wives for abandonment. The same cause of action a woman has on a man who cuts off the money. Funny that.
Re:Fixed it for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
And lose your kids, half your assets, and a good chunk of your pay cheque for possible the rest of your life.
And people wonder why guys don't want to get married.
Re:Fixed it for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that I agree with the specific phrasing of the parent poster -- mostly for rhetorical reasons -- but I think he's right, despite the ridiculous criticism of the followup posters.
I'm 48 years old and 100% of the married men in my peer group (middle class, mostly white males married to mostly white females, all with white collar jobs) complain about their wives lack of interest in sex. ALL of them. I don't think any of the conventional explanations make sense.
As far as I know from my experience with them in domestic situations, all are good contributors to their kids parenting -- two have wives with more demanding jobs and their husbands probably do MORE parenting than their wives. None have any kind of financial problems. All but one are in excellent physical shape, and the former, while "chunky" looks like he did when he was 25, so he's no more out of shape than he was when he was married.
Two of them have both told me stories that when they were trying to have children -- even their second -- their wives were extremely interested in sex, and once the second baby came along -- BAM! -- no interest. Like a switch had flipped, and neither has related any significant life change that happened concurrently (major change in job responsibilities, etc).
My explanation for this is that this is mostly evolutionary biology in action. When women who have given birth hit their 40s, they lose their sex drive. The biology is probably buried in hormonal changes, especially considering that women hit menopause and go infertile.
In terms of evolution, it makes sense that biologically women would lose interest in sex as their bodies become less able to bear children. Women over 40 have increased risk of pregnancy problems, children with chromosomal problems, etc, all things that could be a threat to her or her other offspring if she were to die in childbirth. Childbearing and childrearing is demanding physically, and the older people get the less physical stamina they have.
I think as a well-known phenomenon its probably even gotten "worse" because women are less dependent on men and have greater legal recognition. In times past, older, married women probably didn't want sex any more than they do now, but either went along with it because they felt they had to or their husbands just took it because they could (yes, this is gross, and no I would never support the idea of a husband raping his wife).
Re: (Score:3)
I'm mid-40s, my wife's a little older, our two kids are in their teens. No apparent loss of interest in sex from either of us. There was a period of reduced interest, but we got through it.
Two differences from your story: 1) my wife doesn't work right now (hopefully soon). 2) We're Christians, and regular sex is a commitment (1 Corinthians 7).
Yeah... (Score:4, Interesting)
and how many of those female profiles were just astroturf Ashley Madison profiles put there to entice men into joining?
The whole thing is just a sad commentary on the current state of affairs (no pun intended) of the world we live in. Who are the real villains here? The cheating husbands or the people at AM that set up this apparently honey pot of a web site to lure men in and then charge them to delete their profiles after the fact? A curse on all their houses I say.
Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess, based on my knowledge of regulatory requirements, is that the profile itself was actually deleted, however financial transactions all have a data retention requirement, 7 years or 5 years, I forget. So forcing men to pay to delete, results in the data about his profile being deleted, but that financial transaction tied to that process had to be kept.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, one thing I understood from the linked article, is that except for the email address, which was changed to , nothing seems to have been changed on "deleted" accounts.
No surprise (Score:2)
I figured a site like that would be a sausage fest, women don't seem to have as much trouble getting laid as most men do.
a realist would say Ashley Madison is just a thief (Score:2)
Likewise, Axe is a thief for selling boys on the idea that spraying themselves will make babes throw themselves at said stinky young men, and Pantene is a thief for selling women on the idea that using their brand of shampoo will make them supermodels.
Or... gurps_npc is a socialist idiot who doesn't know how humans are actually motivated.
Remarkable odds (Score:2)
You'd have a better chance of hooking up on Gilligan's Island.
Women Count Too Low (Score:5, Interesting)
That doesn't sound right. I expect that the men completely outnumber the women, and that the 'women' are largely fake, but only 12,000?
With all the advertising that AM has done, and with the huge number of women online (consider pinterest for heavens sake), and the huge number of women that have affairs, it seems unlikely to me that only 12,000 actual women signed up.
Re:Women Count Too Low (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't sound right. I expect that the men completely outnumber the women, and that the 'women' are largely fake, but only 12,000?
With all the advertising that AM has done, and with the huge number of women online (consider pinterest for heavens sake), and the huge number of women that have affairs, it seems unlikely to me that only 12,000 actual women signed up.
Even if there are huge numbers of women interested in having affairs, that doesn't mean that they want to have random internet hookups from a cheating website. All online dating sites are the same -- the men far outnumber the women.
Re:Women Count Too Low (Score:4, Insightful)
A fair point. Plus, one has to consider that if harming AM was their primary aim here, releasing the data is bad, but releasing a subset of the data that demonstrates that kind of male-to-female ratio is perhaps far worse (for AM). If the ratio was 10:1, they're providing a fair service and just not having much luck attracting women; look at all those scumbags who are trying to cheat on their wives! If the ratio is 8000:1 though, look at all those scumbags running the site who are cheating people out of money! If you wanted to put a nail in their coffin, this is a great way to do it -- out the men, embarrass them, give them call to sue AM. Then doubly embarrass them as chumps; surely that'll push a few fence-sitters over the edge.
It does make me wonder. The only way we could verify this is if a bunch of women who had accounts looked themselves up, didn't find themselves, and then self-reported. So we may never know either way on this.
Re: Women Count Too Low (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Women Count Too Low (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh, one point of order.
I do not condone infidelity, yadda yadda yadda, but purely as a practical matter if one is looking to cheat on their spouse and wants things kept discrete, a better choice of partner is someone else who is already married. They have more skin in the game and are more likely to keep things hush hush, because they don't want to be exposed, either. If things go poorly, you can be less afraid of someone threatening to tell your husband, when you can also tell their wife.
That said, yeah, I'm not convinced a website would be the best method of finding such a partner.
AM could be a honeypot (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it was an extortion honeypot, TBH. It's possible that the CEO has criminal connections, or ties to a government intelligence operation. Think about the leverage that could be applied to government officials, politicians, corporate managers, etc. with this information. For example, it's exactly the kind of info the CIA uses against foreign government officials in order to turn them into intelligence assets. And there's already reports of outed AM account holders being extorted to pay up to get their information removed or the blackmailers will forward the info directly to spouses, friends, family, and co-workers. The timing of the release kind of suspect as well. In addition, another site (Rentboy.com, I think) that potentially has damaging info on its account holders was recently raided by the FBI. What if that was a pre-emptive raid in order to keep its database from falling into the hands of hackers and released to the internet? This is Alex Jones territory, I know, but the stated reasons by the Impact Team for releasing the data just doesn't hold water for me.
Re: (Score:3)
If I were a subject of such extortion, I would be less likely to give in to the demands if the data were public. I would know that paying off one extortionist wouldn't prevent the next one from knocking on my door. So, if the CEO of AM were really doing this for that purpose, wouldn't his pretend hackers keep at least most of the data proprietary?
2500 men for every woman? (Score:3)
Their tagline should have been: "Life's short, have a gay affair."
There were some real women... (Score:3, Insightful)
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
In the city I live in (one of the top 10 for population in the US), there were real women on AM who would respond and meet in person. I met two of them for drinks. Of course, the reality of AM is that for me and the women I met it was just a form of marriage counseling where we needed someone to talk through some issues with. In both cases we talked openly about the challenges that arise at different points in marriages and how sex can suffer. We never talked fantasies and, despite obvious chemistry in one of the meetings, never thought of going further than casual conversation. Finding someone to talk to seemed to be what we were after.
Of course, they may have gone on to do more with other men. But, the only reason they said they responded was because mine one of the only non-creepy messages they received. Apparently even married guys think dick pics and very forward sexual comments are the best way to get a woman's attention (tip: no).
So... That means... (Score:3)
So most of these guys whose lives are now ruined never even got any out of it in the first place? Or was that a very busy few women? Oh, man, and I already thought it was a stupid thing to sign up for!
That does it (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
More women than slashdot, I think I've seen five here over the last 17 years
Re: (Score:3)
More women than slashdot, I think I've seen five here over the last 17 years
Keep in mind that not all women on here are obvious. Most people don't realize I'm a woman, because I don't bring it up often when talking technical stuff online. heh
Re:That's Quite the Gender Ratio ... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a woma
Yeah, sure you are. I'm not falling for that again ...
Re:All the data hasn't been released (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:STEM College (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Colour me suprised (Score:5, Interesting)
About 18 months after my wife died, I went on POF and was on it for about 6 months. I didn't want to date anyone from work and am to socially awkward to meet people at bars or clubs.
There are an amazing number of available woman. It took me a while getting used to how fast people moved on a first date - even on a lunch first date.
That said, I met a few quality people and am now engaged with someone I met from that site.