We’ve all heard the story by now: Ashley Madison, the website that claimed to help cheating spouses hook up with each other in complete discretion, was hacked. The hackers released a huge user data dump and it was revealed that 90-95% of AM’s actual users were male, and the remaining were mostly fake female profiles.
Ashley Madison was a scam. But anyone who has the least understanding of sex differences would not be so gullible to think that there are just as many married women interested in anonymous internet sexual liaisons as there are married men interested in the same. Apparently, there are so few married women willing to go online specifically to find an extramarital lover that Ashley Madison could barely crack the 1,000 men:1 real woman ratio.
This is not to say that married women aren’t infidelity risks. But when women, legally taken or otherwise, want to have an illicit affair, their preferred method of target acquisition is a logged-off, face-to-face whirlwind romance, not a lifeless keyboard hunt for a collaborator who will make her feel like the whore she’d rather forget about herself.
A reader writes,
Can hypergamy explain [Ashley Madison’s fake female profiles]? One way to interpret that is, “women have no qualms about leaving their husbands”.
That’s one reason. The dearth of live wives seeking extramarital affairs on Ashley Madison is a consequence of:
- the nature of women to prefer their seduction be veiled behind flirtatious feints and parries (as opposed to arid, conspicuous match-ups with equally debased men)
- the disposition of wives to simply leave their husbands when they want to start new romances (husbands — and single men in relationships — can better tolerate balancing illicit lovers with a wife or steady girlfriend, even over long periods of time).
- the fact that women are not as promiscuous as men.
These are the big three explanations for AM’s 95% man/4.9% fake woman ratio. A fourth explanation — that going online for the explicit purpose of finding a sex partner in crime — is too much for most women’s anti-slut defenses. I suspect the Ashley Madison creators knew this, and figured that the male urge for poosy variety is so strong they could get away with scamming millions of men with impunity. They were right.