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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.

21 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Aha! by nospam007 · · 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.

    1. Re:Aha! by Flavianoep · · Score: 5, Informative

      I guess that those users were more likely to be professional chatters. 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. I could investigate more, but I forgot my password. I could recover it but... *yawn*

      --
      Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
    2. Re:Aha! by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    3. Re:Aha! by JustAnotherOldGuy · · 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%.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    4. Re: Aha! by tlambert · · 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...
      "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.

  2. Really? by Maury+Markowitz · · 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?

    1. Re:Really? by Anonymous Coward · · 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 ;)

    2. Re:Really? by Tom · · 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 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?

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    3. Re:Really? by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 5, Funny

      It means there's 3582 football fields for every 8 library of congress.

    4. Re:Really? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.)

    5. Re:Really? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    6. Re:Really? by trabby · · Score: 5, Funny

      2583 way is less of a leeway and more of a honey surrounded by a freeway...

  3. So was this... by dosius · · 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" ?

    --
    What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
  4. "stealing money from lonely, unhappy men." by umafuckit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Go watch "Love Me" (available on Netflix) about Ukrainian "mail order" brides. Those guys are charging ten bucks per message from the guy to the woman. Ostensibly because of the translation services they off. One of the dudes on there was out $10k on messages to one woman alone.

  5. Fixed it for you. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · 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.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:Fixed it for you. by DNS-and-BIND · · 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.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    2. Re:Fixed it for you. by swb · · 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).

  6. AM could be a honeypot by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  7. Re:So then the question becomes by hawguy · · 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/...

    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?

  8. Re:So then the question becomes by jandersen · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who wants a check from Ashely Madison sent to their home or work?

    Their employees, presumably.

  9. Re:At least a call girl is honest by Dixie_Flatline · · 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.