When considering the “Adulterous Dads of Brooklyn” be wary of soft data and hard ambitions.
AshleyMadison.com®. God in heaven, to be a fly on the wall when they were dreaming up the name for that website. I took a little tour of it this evening after Hugo Schwyzer brought it to my attention in a recent article for Jezebel entitled, “The Cheating Dads of Brooklyn”. As you may know, AshleyMadison.com is a site that helps married people find partners to cheat on their spouses.
AshleyMadison.com’s tag line is Life is short. Have an affair®. It’s registered. So, have an affair, but don’t have that sentence. It belongs to Ashley. Or Madison.
Hugo and the New York Post both ran articles on some new infidelity data provided by AshleyMadison.com. And the data was extra NAUGHTY. Hugo writes: “Park Slope is already infamous for its anxiety-ridden, helicoptering parents. It appears that all of that obsessiveness isn’t just bad for the kids growing up around Prospect Park. It’s also wreaking havoc on their parents’ marriages. According to Ashley Madison –- the website devoted to enabling adultery — Brooklyn’s most desirable community is home to more cheating spouses than any other neighborhood in New York City.”
Which got me doing a little hard hitting investigative journalism of my own. Because this story raised some big questions for me. For instance: How did they ever narrow it down to those two names? Ashley and Madison? What about the other top cheerleader names? What about Brittany, Jennifer, Jessica, Cindy, Megan or Kristen? What about Randi? Randi could have worked, right?
Anyway, let me save you a trip over to AshleyMadison.com. I logged on, so you don’t have to. Imagine lots of pouting men and women with screen names like Candygrrrl, NightAngel or ManPower. Per Hugo, the site’s CEO Noel Biderman”…notes that men and women cheat for different reasons. ‘For women, the more successful they are, the more likely they are to cheat. For men, we’ve found that infidelity usually comes into play when children come on to the scene.'”
And there you have it. The hard science. The statistical data. The facts.
Although, I have to say, when I signed up at AshleyMadison.com to have a look see, they didn’t even ask my real name. There wasn’t anywhere to post pictures of my kids or even say whether I had any. There wasn’t even a place to link to my Facebook page. HELLO! Social networking! Which leads me to ask a pretty obvious question: How did Biderman determine which of his members have kids?
But never mind all that stuff, what’s even more startling to me is this amazing fact: my research has turned up an additional treasure trove of names that Biderman and his crack team must have turned to in order to name his site. Although cheerleader name sites were no doubt a rich vein to mine, it wasn’t until he turned to websites devoted to “preppy names” that he hit infidelity marketing pay dirt. Madison. Madison is a preppy name.
I tear up a little when I imagine that amazing moment when the AshleyMadison.com brand was born. Talk about your new life! Sniff.
To sum up Biderman’s conclusions, women give birth and (ding!) men go hop in bed with other women. Why? Because men are big spoiled babies who don’t want to share the boobie with any grabby little suckerfish of a kid. So they go and hook up with NightAngel and, man, is that some terrific unnibbled boobie. And that, as they say in academic circles, is all she wrote.
Which leaves us with the following question: does AshleyMadison.com CEO Noel Biderman’s conclusions about his customers really tell us anything useful about new fathers and infidelity? Or does it simply enlighten us about AshleyMadison.com’s marketing priorities? If the internet has done anything, it has taught us to be wary of soft data and hard ambitions.
The fact is, Biderman doesn’t know which of his anonymous members even have kids; making AshleyMadison.com’s CEO the last guy in the world who should be holding forth to the press about new fathers and infidelity. New Dads and Moms have enough challenges without this damaging narrative about new fathers being promoted.
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By the way, a better and far more reliable source on issues surrounding infidelity would be psychologist Esther Perel. Her international bestseller Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence speaks to the vast range of challenges couples face in keeping the romance in their marriages. And Perel has a much more nuanced view on the roles of both men and women in the causes and cures for infidelity.
Photo courtesy of wife finding husband cheating courtesy of Shutterstock.
I was curious about Ashley Madison (or AM as it is known to frequent members). I started a profile (which is totally free for women). I would akin the Ashley environment to be like last call hour at a bar. You feel scummy for being there, even worse for entertaining any thoughts, and very much like the bar patrons of my 20’s, the men that I communicated with were pressuring and immature (even the old ones). I realized about four days in that what I was hoping to know, I already did. My needs with my spouse were not being… Read more »
Hey, I just have to say, don’t knock it until you’ve been in someone else’s position. People have affairs for lots of reasons and some people don’t even feel there’s anything wrong with both partners going outside the marriage for sex.
Ashely Madison…Who are people, doing bad things for money, and making pathetic excuses as to why it’s OK?
Next answer please, Alex…
Here’s a fun thing to do: create two Ashely Madison accounts, one for a man and one for a woman. Make sure you have IM turned on, and then just wait. After you’ve had enough, look at their Affair Guarantee Program terms and conditions for receiving a full refund. After that, do a little research on their Affiliate Program and pay special note to how you can earn money as an Ashley Madison Agency affiliate and any gender differences.
After doing this, ask yourself what purpose Mr. Biderman might have in making his claim.
This sounds like a great sting operation!
Joanna, you should totally create an account. In my experience you won’t even need a picture, but if you put the one up you posted on Where’s the Sex? (cropping out your kid of course) the impact will be even bigger.
I’m skeptical of the reasoning Hugo puts together to explain the trend in Park Slope, but the behavior n the Ashley Madison website is very much gendered. What should we think about that?
Hey Nick,
Can you expand on what you mean. I’d like to hear a bit more.
Mark,
Men and women behave very differently on Ashley Madison. When I created an account for my wife (shh, don’t tell her) I hadn’t had a chance to upload a picture yet and “she” was already being barraged by IMs (13 in the first 5 minutes). I created an account for myself and I received a grand total of one collect message from a woman, the expectation being that I (the guy) would be the one paying for her interest in me. Ashely Madison seems to encourage this gender disparity, in its policies, marketing, and affiliate program.
Got it. Well, its clear that the folks at Ashley Madison have good reason to suggest that “more women are cheating” every day. Because it creates the illusion that there is some kind of “infidelity frenzy” going on on their site. But I suspect the male to female numbers are pretty lop-sided. And that many of the “female members” are either pros or deceptive in some way. That is, aside from all the other deception going on in every single male or female profile on the site. LOL
Ashley Madison makes lots of claims that are designed to recruit people, particularly women. Whenever a major holiday comes up, they send out a press release that many women join them right after Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day or whatever.
I suspect that the idea that women who cheat are successful is just a way to help women feel comfortable cheating and to reassure men that if they join, they’ll meet classy ladies.
Great photo. Is he cheating on her, or is the other woman cheating on her?
And, just some objective issues about getting at good data here: Even if Ashley Madison DID keep good stats about its members, there’s no reason to believe that people who use the site are a good cross-section of people who have affairs. Maybe the site attracts a particular type of affair-seeker. And, even if there was an extensive questionnaire used, how reliable could the self-reporting be if these are people who are using the site to do something secretive? This is asking them to tell the truth on a site that they are using to hide a lie. What people… Read more »
If you like pina coladas….
So, I’m just guessing here… not a fan of Ashley Madison?
“For women, the more successful they are, the more likely they are to cheat.”
Note to self…
“For men, we’ve found that infidelity usually comes into play when children come on to the ”
Note to self…stick with pets.
Hey Aya, want to start up a cat rescue service?