Analysis Reveals Almost No Real Women On Ashley Madison

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.

Comments

Fixed it for you.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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:Fixed it for you.

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

[swb]

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:Aha!

[Z00L00K]

Some?

On a site like that - the only real women would be women that are either desperate or looking for other women.

Re:Women Count Too Low

[hawguy]

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:Aha!

[penguinoid]

' 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.

At least a call girl is honest

[MyAlternateID]

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

[MyAlternateID]

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:At least a call girl is honest

[Dixie_Flatline]

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:So then the question becomes

[meta-monkey]

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:Aha!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"'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!

[StikyPad]

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!

[Pfhorrest]

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?