A Rootin' Tootin' Thread for [Ashley Madison] and lol Josh Duggar

Atomika

So, this thing happened.


The names and private information 37 million people were stolen by hackers who raided the data of AshleyMadison.com, a website where consenting married adults meet other consenting married adults for discreet trysts, rendezvouses, hook-ups, and other terms in the modern parlance for screwing around on the down-low. I'm really surprised the number of affected users is that high, considering it's estimated that there are only 60 million married couples in the whole US, meaning if only one person in that relationship is stepping out with help from A-M, almost 2 in 3 marriages in America are affected by this! Now, other facts dictate that this statistic is likely nowhere near that high, but it's still a surprising amount.

What I do want to talk about:

- Do we care about the protection of personal data when it comes to private indiscretions?
- Does the circumstances around the a situation make it any more or less actionable?
- Do those who have had their data stolen deserve outing?
- Is cheating okay? If so, when? Why?
- Is not telling your partner about cheating okay?
- Do you have anything personal that is pertinent to this discussion to share?


What I do not in any way want:

- technical discussions regarding data protection
- people getting upset and self-righteous in their opinions
- disrespect of others
- mentions of the Star Wars EU sorry wrong thread
- glib dismissals or judgment if someone shares something really personal

Daedalus

So, another interesting note in this whole fiasco is that Ashley Madison also sold a "service" where you'd pay them twenty bucks and they'd promise to delete all your personal information from their system. This "service" brought in a couple million dollars in revenue.

It turns out that AM didn't actually do that second part, and the hackers have the names, addresses, and credit card numbers of everyone who paid for deletion.

Tofystedeth

Atomika wrote: »

What I do want to talk about:

- Do we care about the protection of personal data when it comes to private indiscretions?

Only to the extent that we care about all privacy.

- Does the circumstances around the a situation make it any more or less actionable?

While I don't want 37 million people's info spewed all over the web, I definitely believe the circumstances around it needed to be brought into the light. I believe all sites that let you create accounts with any sort of personal data should give you the option of deleting them. The fact these sites had such an option but only if you paid them, and then couldn't even do it right is terrible.

- Do those who have had their data stolen deserve outing?

No, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a few rich/powerful/politician types who I would probably feel some schadenfreude at.

- Is cheating okay? If so, when? Why?

No. Cheating is by definition breaking the spoken/unspoken rules of a relationship. If you want to get with someone else, either break off your current relationship or both/all parties need to agree to a different set of rules.

- Is not telling your partner about cheating okay?

Depends? Cheating is already a pretty terrible thing to do to someone. For some people not knowing is worse. For others knowing is better.

fortis

The fact that these sites promised to wipe accounts for a fee and then kept the data anyways, is a despicable and possibly criminal act. But that still doesn't give a group of anonymous people the right to grab sensitive, personal information and hold it hostage. You aren't punishing the company as much as you're punishing the users. Do I believe cheating is wrong? Yes. But I also think that issue is between the two partners and shouldn't be subject to the public at large.

Xaquin

Atomika wrote: »

I'm really surprised the number of affected users is that high, considering it's estimated that there are only 60 million married couples in the whole US, meaning if only one person in that relationship is stepping out with help from A-M, almost 2 in 3 marriages in America are affected by this!

I'll wager dimes to dollars that the majority of people on that site are just single people who don't care if they're hooking up with married people.

TL DR

First, my personal responses to some of the prompts in the OP.

- Do we care about the protection of personal data when it comes to private indiscretions?

Yes. Protection of personal data is important and value judgments about that data are largely irrelevant. Some people may justify outing a vehemently anti-gay politician who is himself having a homosexual affair, for instance, but even this very charitable case is an extremely gray area and effectively places conditions of non-hypocrisy or realpolitik over the privacy rights held by all individuals.

- Does the circumstances around the a situation make it any more or less actionable?

I think this is what we will find to be the crux of the issue. For instance, if I change in a fundamental way after marriage and am no longer interested in sexually pleasing my wife, and am neither open to therapy nor allowing an open relationship and disruption of the relationship would be devastating to our children, then no one can judge my wife for seeking covert sexual fulfillment. Would it be awful if she was found out and our kids suffered through a divorce? Yes. But both partners are culpable in this situation at least to a degree.

- Do those who have had their data stolen deserve outing?

Some do, some undoubtedly do not. Some of the users on AM, for instance, are prostitutes and represent perhaps the most innocent parties in this entire matter.

- Is cheating okay? If so, when? Why?

I'll defer to Dan Savage to express this one.
“Cheating is permissible when it amounts to the least worst option, i.e., it is allowed for someone who has made a monogamous commitment and isn’t getting any at home (sick or disabled spouse, or withholding-without-cause spouse (after good faith efforts have made to clearly inform withholding without cause spouse of needs (and their importance) and making good faith efforts resolve needs consensually) and divorce isn’t an option (sick or disabled spouse, or withholding-without-cause-spouse-who-can’t-be-divorced-for-some-karma-imperiling-reason-or-other) and the sex on the side makes it possible for the cheater to stay married and stay sane. (An exception can be made for a married person with a kink that his or her spouse can’t/won’t accommodate, so long as the kink can be taken care of safely and discreetly.)”

Now, a great article in which Dan Savage contextualizes cheating, affairs, and the spectrum of monogamy.

Married, With Infidelities
By MARK OPPENHEIMER JUNE 30, 2011
Last month, when the New York congressman Anthony Weiner finally
admitted that he had lied, that his Twitter account had not been hacked, that
he in fact had sent a picture of his thinly clad undercarriage to a stranger in
Seattle, I asked my wife of six years, mother of our three children, what she
thought. More specifically, I asked which would upset her more: to learn that I
was sending racy self­portraits to random women, Weiner­style, or to discover
I was having an actual affair. She paused, scrunched up her mouth as if she
had just bitten a particularly sour lemon and said: “An affair is at least a
normal human thing. But tweeting a picture of your crotch is just weird.”
How do we account for that revulsion, which many shared with my wife, a
revulsion that makes it hard to imagine a second act for Weiner, like Eliot
Spitzer’s television career or pretty much every day in the life of Bill Clinton?
One explanation is that the Weiner scandal was especially sordid: drawn out,
compounded daily with new revelations, covered up with embarrassing lies
that made us want to look away. But another possibility is that there was
something not weird, but too familiar about Weiner. His style might not be for
everyone (to put it politely), but the impulse to be something other than what
we are in our daily, monogamous lives, the thrill that comes from the illicit
rather than the predictable, is something I imagine many couples can identify
with. With his online flirtations and soft­porn photos, he did what a lot of us
might do if we were lonely and determined to not really cheat.
That is one reason it was a relief when Weiner was drummed from office.
In addition to giving us some good laughs, he forced us to ask particularly
uncomfortable questions, like “what am I capable of doing?” and “what have
my neighbors or friends done?” His visage was insisting, night after night, that
we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about
whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.
That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America’s leading sex­advice
columnist, would say. Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an
archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years
been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic
that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage.
In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American
obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we
might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for
pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict
monogamy to wide openness.
Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that
our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some
people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need
flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t
help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some
marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in
other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission.
In both cases, honesty is the best policy.
“I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me, “when it
comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But
people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of
the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom,
despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.”
The view that we need a little less fidelity in marriages is dangerous for a
gay­marriage advocate to hold. It feeds into the stereotype of gay men as
compulsively promiscuous, and it gives ammunition to all the forces, religious
and otherwise, who say that gay families will never be real families and that we
had better stop them before they ruin what is left of marriage. But Savage says
a more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight
community needs. Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor,
as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic
expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys
more families than it saves.
Savage, who is 46, has been writing Savage Love since 1991 for The
Stranger, an alternative weekly paper in Seattle that syndicates it to more than
50 other newspapers. Savage’s sex advice puts me in mind of a smart, tough
old grandmother, randy yet stern. It’s Dr. Ruth if she were interested in
bondage and threesomes. And if she were Catholic: Savage was raised in
ethnic­Irish Chicago, one of four children of a cop and a homemaker. He did
some time in Catholic school, and his writing bears traces of the church’s stark
moral clarity, most notable in his impatience with postmodern or queer
theorizing or anything that might overturn the centrality of the stable nuclear
family.
Savage is not a churchgoer, but he is a cultural Catholic. Listeners to “This
American Life,” which since 1996 has aired his homely monologues about his
family, might recognize the kinship of those personal stories to the Catholic
homilies Savage heard every Sunday of his childhood. Less a scriptural
exegesis, like what you get in many a Protestant church, the priest’s homily is
often short and framed as a fable or lesson: it’s an easily digested moral tale.
You can hear that practiced didacticism in his radio segments about DJ, the
son that he and Terry Miller, his husband, adopted as an infant, and you can
hear it in the moving piece he read about his mother, who, on her deathbed,
said she loved Terry “like a daughter.”
And you can hear it in the It Gets Better project, Savage’s great
contribution to family values. Last September, in response to the reported
suicides of several young men bullied for being, or seeming, gay, Savage
prevailed on the very private Miller, whom he married in 2005 in Vancouver,
to make a video about how their lives got better after high school. In the video,
they talk into the camera about their courtship, becoming parents and how
wonderfully accepting their families have been. “We have really great lives
together,” Miller says at the end. Savage adds, “And you can have a great life,
too.” Savage posted the video on Sept. 21. Within two months, there were
10,000 videos from people attesting to their own it­gets­better experience,
viewed a collective 35 million times. The “It Gets Better” book, a selection of
narratives, made The Times’s nonfiction best­seller list. In May, the It Gets
Better campaign was featured in an advertisement for Google’s Chrome Web
browser.
It Gets Better is, in the end, a paean to stable families: it is a promise to
gay youth that if they can just survive the bullying, they can have spouses and
children when they grow up. With Savage, the goal is always the possibility of
stable, adult families, for gays and straights alike. He is capable of pro­family
rants that, stripped of his habitual profanity, would be indistinguishable from
Christian­right fund­raising letters.
How, then, can Savage be a monogamy skeptic? When Savage first began
writing Savage Love, it was a jokey column, one in which he aimed “to treat
straight sex with the same revulsion that straight advice columnists had always
had for gay sex,” as Savage told me, when we met in Seattle in April. But he
quickly realized that his correspondents were turning to him to save their love
lives, not their sex lives.
Today, Savage Love is less a sex column than a relationship column, one
point of which is to help good unions last. Sexual fulfillment matters in its own
right, but mainly it matters because without it, families are more likely to
break apart. It is for the sake of staying together — not merely for the sake of
orgasms — that Savage coined his famous acronym, “G.G.G.”: lovers ought to
be good, giving and game (put another way, skilled, generous and up for
anything). And if they cannot fulfill all of each other’s desires, then it may be
advisable to decide to go outside the bounds of marriage if that is what it takes
to make the marriage work.
Savage’s position on monogamy is frequently caricatured. He does not
believe in promiscuity; indeed, his attacks on the anonymous­sex, gaybathhouse
culture were once taken as proof of a secret conservative agenda.
And he does not believe that monogamy is wrong for all couples or even for
most couples. Rather, he says that a more realistic sexual ethic would prize
honesty, a little flexibility and, when necessary, forgiveness over absolute
monogamy. And he believes nostalgically, like any good conservative, that we
might look to the past for some clues.
“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing
the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be
monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until
everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.” In the feminist
revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and
pressure­release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the
confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”
In their own marriage, Savage and Miller practice being what he calls
“monogamish,” allowing occasional infidelities, which they are honest about.
Miller was initially opposed to the idea. “You assume as a younger person that
all relationships are monogamous and between two people, that love means
nothing can come between you,” said Miller, who met Savage at a club in 1995,
when he was 23 and Savage was 30. “Dan has taught me to be more realistic
about that kind of stuff.
“It was four or five years before it came up,” Miller said. “It’s not about
having three­ways with somebody or having an open relationship. It is just sort
of like, Dan has always said if you have different tastes, you have to be good,
giving and game, and if you are not G.G.G. for those tastes, then you have to
give your partner the out. It took me a while to get down with that.” When I
asked Savage how many extramarital encounters there have been, he laughed
shyly. “Double digits?” I asked. He said he wasn’t sure; later he and Miller
counted, and he reported back that the number was nine. “And far from it
being a destabilizing force in our relationship, it’s been a stabilizing force. It
may be why we’re still together.”
While his marriage opened up gradually, Savage says that “there’s not a
one­size­fits­all way” to approach nonmonogamy, especially if both partners
committed to monogamy at the start. “Folks on the verge of making those
monogamous commitments,” Savage told me in one of our many e­mail
exchanges, “need to look at the wreckage around them — all those failed
monogamous relationships out there (Schwarzenegger, Clinton, Vitter,
whoever’s on the cover of US magazine this week) — and have a conversation
about what it’ll mean if one or the other partner should cheat. And agree, at the
very least, to getting through it, to place a higher value on the relationship
itself than on one component of it, sexual exclusivity.”
Not that heeding our desires always simplifies matters. One recent writer
to Savage Love thought he would enjoy seeing his wife fool around with
another man, and initially did: “Almost every kinky kind was being had and
enjoyed.” But when his wife had vaginal intercourse with the other man,
something happened. “It was as if all the air in the room was sucked out
through my soul,” he writes. Savage’s reply is pragmatic: “If there’s a sex act —
say, vaginal intercourse — that holds huge symbolic importance for you or your
partner, it might be best to take that act off the menu.” The answer, to Savage’s
way of thinking, is smarter boundaries, not hard­line rules about monogamy.
For most people, sex cannot be so transactional; it is bound up with
emotional need — to feel we excite our partner above all others, to believe that
we have primacy in their lives. The question is whether it’s possible to act on
our desires sensibly, as Savage would have it, while maintaining the special
equilibrium we trust our marriages, or long­term partnerships, to preserve. Do
we know our relationships well enough to go outside them?
There have always been nonmonogamous marriages. In 2001, The
Journal of Family Psychology summarized earlier research, finding that
“infidelity occurs in a reliable minority of American marriages.” Estimates that
“between 20 and 25 percent of all Americans will have sex with someone other
than their spouse while they are married” are conservative, the authors wrote.
In 2010, NORC, a research center at the University of Chicago, found that,
among those who had ever been married, 14 percent of women and 20 percent
of men admitted to affairs.
There is no agreement over how honestly we should discuss this reality
with our own spouses. Some are nostalgic for the old hypocrisy, the code of
silence, the mistresses and concubines men kept discreetly on the side. Clergy
members may practice a kind of selective muteness: in their premarital
counseling, they often do not stress the possibility of future affairs — but once
an affair occurs, they vocally urge couples to tough it out. But what if they were
to say, ahead of time: “You two love each other, and you promise you won’t
stray, but you might. People do. And if you do, I hope you won’t think it’s the
end of the world.”
Such straight talk about the difficulty of monogamy, Savage argues, is
simply good sense. People who are eager to cheat need to be honest with their
partners, but people who think they would never cheat need honesty even
more. “The point,” he wrote on his blog last year, “is that people — particularly
those who value monogamy — need to understand why being monogamous is
so much harder than they’ve been led to believe.”
How exactly does Savage think talking about monogamy’s trials make
practicing it easier? In part, by reminding people to be good, giving and game.
Straight talk about why we might cheat helps couples figure out ways to keep
each other satisfied at home. If I promise my wife that I would never, ever, ever
sleep with another woman, the conversation might end there, the two of us
gazing into each other’s eyes (even if our minds might be wandering). But if I
say, “I’ve been feeling sexually unfulfilled lately because I have a secret fantasy
about trading dirty pictures with a woman” — well, then maybe my wife will email
me some of her. And so monogamy is preserved.
“If you are expected to be monogamous and have one person be all things
sexually for you, then you have to be whores for each other,” Savage says. “You
have to be up for anything.”
Savage’s straight­talk approach has an intuitive appeal: our culture places
a huge premium on honesty, or at least on confessional, therapeutic, Oprahfied
admissions. We are told to say what is on our minds, so why not extend
that principle to sex? Why not tell your spouse everything you want, even if
that includes wanting another person? My sense is that this kind of radical
honesty may work best for couples who already have strong marriages. Where
there is love and equality and no history of betrayal, one partner asking if she
can have a fling may not be so risky. Her partner either says yes, and it
happens, you hope, with only the best consequences; or the partner says no, in
which case their relationship endures, maybe with a little disappointment on
one side, a little suspicion on the other.
That is the ideal situation. What if the revelation that a partner is thinking
about others creates a shift, one that plagues the marriage? Words have
consequences, and most couples, knowing that jealousy is real and can beset
any of us, opt for a tacit code of reticence. Not just about sex but about all sorts
of things: there are couples who can express opinions about each other’s
clothing choices or cooking or taste in movies, and there are couples who
cannot. I don’t mind if my wife tells me another man is hot, but it took me a
long time to accept her criticism of my writing. We all have many sensitive
spots, but one of the most universal is the fear of not being everything to your
partner — the fear, in other words, that she might find somebody worthier. It is
the fear of being alone.
Where a relationship is troubled, and one partner senses, correctly, that
aloneness is an imminent threat, then the other partner asking for permission
to have a fling is no neutral act. If you are scared of losing your partner, you
may say yes to anything she asks, including permission for an affair that will
wound you deeply. “The problem is that with many of these couples, one
partner wants it, and the other says yes because she’s afraid that he will leave
her,” says Janis Abrahms Spring, a psychologist and couples’ therapist whose
book, “After the Affair,” is about couples badly damaged by infidelity.
Spring is inclined to a pessimism as strong as Savage’s optimism — after
all, she works with couples who have ended up in counseling — but she offers a
persuasive reminder that there may be no such thing as total honesty. Even
when we think we are enthusiastically assenting to a partner’s request, we may
not know ourselves as well as we think we do. This is true not just for
monogamy but also for sexual acts within marriage. Some of Savage’s toughest
critics are feminists who think he can be a bit too glib with his injunction to
please our partners.

TL DR

continued:

“Sometimes he can shame women for not being into things that their male
partners are into, if they have male partners,” Sady Doyle, a feminist blogger,
told me. “The whole good­giving­and­game thing is something I actually agree
with. I don’t think you should flip out on your partner if they share something
sexual with you. But I think sometimes it’s much harder for women to say, ‘I’m
not into that,’ or ‘Please, I don’t want to do that, let’s do something else,’ than
it is to say, ‘Sure.’ Putting all the onus on the person who doesn’t have that
fetish or desire, particularly if the person who doesn’t have that desire is the
woman, really reproduces a lot of old structures and means of oppression for
women.”
Spring and Doyle both hint at a larger truth about men and women, which
is that, generally speaking, they view sex differently. While there are plenty of
women who can separate sex from love, can be happily promiscuous or could
have a meaningless, one­time fling, there are — let’s face it — more men like
that. The world of Savage Love will always appeal more to men, even men who
truly love their partners. Cheating men are often telling the truth when they
say, “She meant nothing to me.” It really was just sex. And Savage tells us that,
with proper disclosure and consent, just sex can be O.K.
But for many women, and not a few men, there is no such thing as “just
sex,” for their partners or for themselves. What if a woman, or a man for that
matter, looks outside marriage for the other emotional satisfactions that come
along with sex? Savage has less to offer that person. He does not tell people to
take long­term boyfriends or girlfriends. He is skeptical that group marriages,
of three or more partners, can last very long. Nor could he have much to offer
the person who feels a partner ought to constrain his urges. There is a reason
that sex advice is easier to give than relationship advice. Satisfying a sexual
yearning is easier than satisfying a hole in your life.
In an e­mail he sent me, Savage countered that “there are plenty of women
out there who have affairs just for the sex.” But he agreed that there is
something male about his perspective. “Well, I’m male,” he wrote. “And
women, straight women, are in relationships with men. Doesn’t it help to know
what we’re really like? Women can go on marrying and pretending that their
boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But
where’s that going to get ’em? Besides divorce court?”
Savage’s honesty ethic gives couples permission to find happiness in
unusual places; he believes that pretty much anything can be used to spice up a
marriage, although he excludes feces, pets and incest, as well as minors, the
nonconsenting, the duped and the dead. In “The Commitment,” Savage’s book
about his and Miller’s decision to marry, he describes how a college student
approached him after a campus talk and said, as Savage tells it, that “he got off
on having birthday cakes smashed in his face.” But no one had ever obliged
him. “My heart broke when he told me that the one and only time he told a
girlfriend about his fetish, she promptly dumped him. Since then he had been
too afraid to tell anyone else.” Savage took the young man up to his hotel room
and smashed a cake in his face.
The point is: priests and rabbis don’t tell couples they might need to
involve cake play in their marriages; moms and dads don’t; even best friends
can be shy about saying what they like. Savage wants to make sure that no
strong marriage ever fails because an ashamed husband or wife is desperately
seeking cake play — or bondage, urine play or any of the other unspeakable
activities that Savage has helped make speakable. If cake play is what a man
needs, his G.G.G. wife should give it to him; if she can’t bring herself to, then
maybe she should allow him a chocolate­frosted excursion with another
woman. But for God’s sake, keep it together for the kids.
If you believe Savage, there is strong precedent, in other times and in
other cultures, for nonmonogamous relationships that endure. In fact, there
has recently been a good deal of scholarship proving that point, including
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s “Sex at Dawn,” one of Savage’s favorite
books, and Stephanie Coontz’s definitive “Marriage, a History.” Like Savage,
Coontz says she believes that “people often end up exploding a relationship
that was working well because one partner strays or has an affair that doesn’t
mean anything.”
But, she says, we are to some extent trapped in our culture. It is one thing
for the Inuit men to have “temporary wives,” whom they take along on trips
when they leave their other wives at home, and for pregnant Bari women, in
Venezuela, to have sex with multiple men, all of whom are considered
responsible for the eventual child. Their societies have very different ideas
about marriage. “I think you can combine a high tolerance of flings with a deemphasis
on jealousy in long­term relationships,” Coontz said, “but usually
that is only in societies where friendships and kin relationships are as
emotionally salient as romantic partnerships.”
In the 18th century, according to Coontz, American men could mention
their mistresses in letters to their wives’ brothers; they could mention
contracting syphilis from a prostitute. Men understood the masculine
prerogative, and they countenanced it, even at the expense of their own sisters.
“That would be unthinkable today,” Coontz said. “For thousands of years it was
expected of men they would have affairs and flings, but not on the terms of
honesty and equality Dan envisions. I can certainly see the appeal of
suggesting we try and make this an open, mutual, gender­equal arrangement.
I’m a little dubious how much that is going to work.”
It was not until the 20th century that Americans evolved an
understanding of marriage in which partners must meet all of each other’s
needs: sexual, emotional, material. When we rely on our partners for
everything, any hint of betrayal is terrifying. “That is the bind we are in,”
Coontz said. “We accord so much priority to the couple relationship. It is tough
under those conditions for most people to live with the insecurity of giving
their partners permission to have flings.”
There is one subculture in America that practices nonmonogamy and
equality between partners: the sizable group of gay men in open, or semiopen,
long­term partnerships. (A study published in 2010 found 50 percent of gay
male couples in the Bay Area had sexual relationships outside their union, with
their partner’s knowledge and approval.) But it is unclear if gay habits, which
Savage thinks can be a model, will survive the advent of gay equality.
Historically, gay men have treated monogamy more casually, in part because
society treated gay coupledom as unthinkable. Now, however, gay men are
marrying or entering into socially sanctioned partnerships. As they are
absorbed into the mainstream of connubial bliss, they may lose the strong
friendship networks that gay men once substituted for nuclear families —
friendship networks that, according to Coontz, can make infidelity less
threatening. In other words, as they take out joint mortgages and pal around
with straight parents from the PTA, they may become considerably more
square about fidelity. Living in their McMansions, they, too, may decide that
the walls of their marriages must be guarded at all costs.
Judith Stacey, a New York University sociologist who researched gay
men’s romantic arrangements for her book “Unhitched,” argues that gay men,
in general, will continue to require less monogamy. “They are men,” she said,
and she believes it is easier for them — right down to the physiology of orgasm
— to separate physical and emotional intimacy. Lesbians and straight women
tend to be far less comfortable with nonmonogamy than gay men. But what
matters is that neither monogamy nor polygamy is humankind’s sole natural
state. “One size never fits all, and it isn’t just dividing between men and women
and gay and straight,” she said. “Monogamy is not natural, nonmonogamy is
not natural. Variation is what’s natural.”
I asked Stacey if, given the differences between men and women, she
thought Savage’s vision was unrealistic for straight couples. Yes and no, she
said: “I believe monogamy is actually crucial for some couples and totally
irrelevant for others.” That does not mean that nonmonogamous couples are
free to do as they please. Creating nonmonogamy that strengthens rather than
corrodes a marriage is surely as much work as monogamy. Couples should
make vows and honor them. Not all good relationships require monogamy, but
they all require what she calls integrity.
“What integrity means for me is we shouldn’t impose a single vow of
monogamy as a superior standard for all relationships,” Stacey said. “Intimate
partners should decide the vows you want to make. Work out terms of what
your commitments are, and be on same page. There are women perfectly
happy to have agreements in which when you are out of town you can have a
little fling on the side. And rules range from ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ to ‘I want to
know’ to ‘bring it home and talk about it and excite our relationship.’ ”
Stacey and Savage each say that monogamy is the right choice for many
couples; they are exalting options, not any particular option. As a straight,
monogamous, married male, I happen to think this is a good thing: if there are
people whose marriages work best with more flexibility, they should find the
courage to choose an arrangement that works for them, society be damned. I
also recognize, however, that we may choose marriage in part to escape the
terror of choice. There are so many reasons to marry; we could call them all
“love,” but let’s be more specific: admiring how she looks in a sundress,
trusting her to improve your first drafts, knowing that when the time comes
she will make the best mother ever. But another reason might be that life
before her was so confusing. In all those other relationships, it was never clear
when there was an exclusive commitment or who would use the L­word first or
when a Saturday­night date could be assumed.
Marrying has the virtue of clearing all that up: exclusive, you both use the
L­word, Saturday night assumed. Simple, right?
Not long ago, I mentioned Savage to a psychotherapist who works with
children. He said that the It Gets Better project had saved the lives of several of
his patients. “They tell me they might have killed themselves if it weren’t for
Dan Savage,” my friend said, as tears filled his eyes.
Hearing such reactions, and having been personally subjected by Savage
to his earnest, ardent effusions about his wonderful husband and awesome
son, it is tough to credit anyone who thinks Savage is a subversive figure. When
I think of Savage, I think of his response to the mother whose ex­husband, her
son’s father, was undergoing a sex change. Her son was angry, and she
wondered what she should say to him. Savage said the boy was entitled to his
feelings. “Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults
in their lives,” Savage wrote. “Perhaps I’m a transphobic bigot,” but asking a
father to wait “a measly 36 months” before having his penis chopped off “is a
sacrifice any father should be willing to make for his 15­year­old son. Call me
old­fashioned.”
Savage is old­fashioned, as bitterly hilarious as that might sound to gaymarriage
opponents. After the news of the Arnold Schwarzenegger love child
broke, I received an e­mail from Savage in which he expressed concern about
the article I was writing. As I would expect, he framed his position in terms of
respect for the family.
“I’m afraid,” he wrote, “it’s going to become: ‘This Savage person is krazy.
Just look at what nonmonogamy did for Arnold! Look at the chaos that being
nonmonogamous creates! Failed marriages, devastated children, scandal!’ But
Arnold wasn’t in a nonmonogamous relationship. He was in a monogamous
relationship. He failed at monogamy; he didn’t succeed at nonmonogamy.”
Savage does not believe people should live in toxic, miserable marriages.
The Schwarzenegger family is surely beyond repair. But they are an extreme
case: not all adultery produces secret families. Most of it is minor by
comparison, and Savage believes that adultery can be one of those trials, like
financial woes or ill health, that marriages can be expected to survive.
“Given the rates of infidelity, people who get married should have to swear
a blood oath that if it’s violated, as traumatic as that would be, the greater good
is the relationship,” Savage told me. “The greater good is the home created for
children. If there are children present, they’ll get past it. The cultural
expectation should be if there’s infidelity, the marriage is more important than
fidelity.”
It gets better? It does. But it also gets very complicated. Savage is not
arguing “let Arnold be Arnold.” He is imploring us to know the people we
marry and to know ourselves and to plan accordingly. He believes that our
actions mark us as a compassionate people, that in truth we are always ready
to forgive an adulterer, except the one we are married to. He points out that
the Louisiana senator, and prominent john, David Vitter — “who I hate,” he
reassures me — is still in office, and that “Bill Clinton is a beloved elder
statesman, and Eliot Spitzer is back on television.” We are already a nation of
forgivers, even when it comes to marriage. Dan Savage thinks we should take
some pride in that.

TL DR

Xaquin wrote: »

Atomika wrote: »

I'm really surprised the number of affected users is that high, considering it's estimated that there are only 60 million married couples in the whole US, meaning if only one person in that relationship is stepping out with help from A-M, almost 2 in 3 marriages in America are affected by this!

I'll wager dimes to dollars that the majority of people on that site are just single people who don't care if they're hooking up with married people.

Wikipedia wrote:

Unless they know how to opt out of the "Ashley's Angels" feature, the site's Terms and Conditions say that users who have not yet paid the site any money ("Guest" accounts) may get computer-generated messages from fictitious profiles that "are NOT conspicuously identified as such." These may cost money to respond to. The site says this feature is "to provide entertainment."

also

In 2012, the company was sued by former employee Doriana Silva, who stated that in preparation for the launch of the company's Portuguese-language website, she was assigned to create over a thousand bogus member profiles within a three-week period in order to attract paying customers, and that this caused her to develop repetitive stress injury. The lawsuit claimed that as a result Doriana "developed severe pain in her wrists and forearms", and has been unable to work since 2011.[29] Ashley Madison countersued, alleging fraud.

TL DR

So 37 million accounts and it's basically



I have to imagine a much larger percentage of married people, cheating or not, look for action on more mainstream sites like OKCupid.

darleysam

My position on all of this is, I personally don't condone cheating on your spouse, in general it's not something I would support (but I don't like absolutes and want to leave some leeway there for exceptions), but it's also not my place to enforce those attitudes on other people. While legality isn't necessarily the best line to draw, these people haven't done anything illegal and I don't feel like it's my or anyone else's place to gloat about it potentially backfiring on them. It feels like a puritanical village gossip spreading their big news around just to light some fires, under the guise of "well they shouldn't be doing it", but it's all just for self-gratification rather than any intent to help.
Yeah if there's people cheating whose marriages are about to be wrecked, then maybe they could use a push in getting it sorted out. But that's a private matter for them to deal with as they see fit, not thrown out in the open for everyone to watch and feel superior about.

Dynagrip

Article I just read said that 37 million number is world wide though another one said USA & Canada.

I wonder how many couples have both members on the site.

TL DR

Dynagrip wrote: »

Article I just read said that 37 million number is world wide though another one said USA & Canada.

I wonder how many couples have both members on the site.

I wonder how many couples have messaged each other and then realized "oh snap you're into this weird shit too?"

Bogart

TL DR wrote: »

I wonder how many couples have messaged each other

IF YOU LIKE PINA COLADAS

Xaquin

darleysam wrote: »

My position on all of this is, I personally don't condone cheating on your spouse, in general it's not something I would support (but I don't like absolutes and want to leave some leeway there for exceptions), but it's also not my place to enforce those attitudes on other people. While legality isn't necessarily the best line to draw, these people haven't done anything illegal and I don't feel like it's my or anyone else's place to gloat about it potentially backfiring on them. It feels like a puritanical village gossip spreading their big news around just to light some fires, under the guise of "well they shouldn't be doing it", but it's all just for self-gratification rather than any intent to help.
Yeah if there's people cheating whose marriages are about to be wrecked, then maybe they could use a push in getting it sorted out. But that's a private matter for them to deal with as they see fit, not thrown out in the open for everyone to watch and feel superior about.

pretty sure cheating on a spouse is illegal (which is why it's grounds for instant divorce).

Bogart

I'm pretty sure adultery isn't illegal. Grounds for divorce doesn't mean it's illegal.

Xaquin

Bogart wrote: »

I'm pretty sure adultery isn't illegal. Grounds for divorce doesn't mean it's illegal.

fair enough I guess

If the intentional breaching of a marriage contract isn't considered illegal

Neco

Illegal in some states, not others. That is in the US, no idea elsewhere.

Shivahn

Xaquin wrote: »

Atomika wrote: »

I'm really surprised the number of affected users is that high, considering it's estimated that there are only 60 million married couples in the whole US, meaning if only one person in that relationship is stepping out with help from A-M, almost 2 in 3 marriages in America are affected by this!

I'll wager dimes to dollars that the majority of people on that site are just single people who don't care if they're hooking up with married people.

Also, I think the stats include other countries.

Cheating is endemic - something like 50% of relationships have some manner of infidelity. The number is very high - but it's not two thirds, and it's not the case that EVERY SINGLE ONE uses AM.

Bogart

I now find it's illegal in some countries (mostly the ones you'd expect) and I guess some states in the US. Nowhere in Europe criminalises it.

Adultery remains a criminal offense in 21 states, although prosecutions are rare.

Astonishing, though I guess they don't prosecute and keep it on the books to maybe assuage religious types? I dunno. Consensual hanky-panky with an adult doesn't seem like it should be a crime in a modern country. It makes you a dirty cheater, but an actual criminal?

TL DR

Xaquin wrote: »

Bogart wrote: »

I'm pretty sure adultery isn't illegal. Grounds for divorce doesn't mean it's illegal.

fair enough I guess

If the intentional breaching of a marriage contract isn't considered illegal

It can be a factor in legal proceedings related to divorce, but it's not illegal. Any real 'breach of contract' stuff would involve a separate prenuptial agreement as opposed to the vast majority of marriages.

Shivahn

Bogart wrote: »

I now find it's illegal in some countries (mostly the ones you'd expect) and I guess some states in the US. Nowhere in Europe criminalises it.

Adultery remains a criminal offense in 21 states, although prosecutions are rare.

Astonishing, though I guess they don't prosecute and keep it on the books to maybe assuage religious types? I dunno.

American state law is often invalidated by things like supreme court stuff, and after that no one cares to remove it. I think being gay is still technically illegal in a couple states, for example. So it's usually less to assuage religious types and more because either higher courts declare it in violation of the constitution, or because society moves past it and it's like whatever

Xaquin

TL DR wrote: »

Xaquin wrote: »

Bogart wrote: »

I'm pretty sure adultery isn't illegal. Grounds for divorce doesn't mean it's illegal.

fair enough I guess

If the intentional breaching of a marriage contract isn't considered illegal

It can be a factor in legal proceedings related to divorce, but it's not illegal. Any real 'breach of contract' stuff would involve a separate prenuptial agreement as opposed to the vast majority of marriages.

I'm fairly sure that 'no cheating' is pretty standard for marriage. Which is why it's immediate grounds for divorce.

DevoutlyApathetic

Bogart wrote: »

I now find it's illegal in some countries (mostly the ones you'd expect) and I guess some states in the US. Nowhere in Europe criminalises it.

Adultery remains a criminal offense in 21 states, although prosecutions are rare.

Astonishing, though I guess they don't prosecute and keep it on the books to maybe assuage religious types? I dunno. Consensual hanky-panky with an adult doesn't seem like it should be a crime in a modern country. It makes you a dirty cheater, but an actual criminal?

It's still on the books because we never go through and clean up outdated laws and repealing it is horrible optics for a politician (i.e. "Pro-Adultery!"). It's pretty much never prosecuted.

Shivahn

Also I guess I should answer some of these:

Atomika wrote: »

- Do we care about the protection of personal data when it comes to private indiscretions?
- Does the circumstances around the a situation make it any more or less actionable?
- Do those who have had their data stolen deserve outing?
- Is cheating okay? If so, when? Why?
- Is not telling your partner about cheating okay?
- Do you have anything personal that is pertinent to this discussion to share?


What I do not in any way want:

- technical discussions regarding data protection
- people getting upset and self-righteous in their opinions
- disrespect of others
- mentions of the Star Wars EU sorry wrong thread
- glib dismissals or judgment if someone shares something really personal

Yes, we always care about protection of personal data unless there's like, some urgency or law enforcement needs it, and even then we care because we want them to get warrants

Legally, no, I don't think the circumstances make a difference. Ethically, no, because I'm all about not enforcing morality on others.

Also no, no one really "deserves outing" for something unless it's posing a clear and present danger to someone.

While I'm not gonna say cheating is ok, or that not telling your partner is ok (it is a sign something's wrong, really), I think it's understandable. And given its current levels in our society (I don't have a cite for the 50% number but I learned it from a professor who studies such things like, five months ago), I think the general view of cheaters as monsters is something that should be pushed back against. They generally hurt other people, or put themselves in positions to (by virtue of what they do), but they're also less terrible individuals and more individuals who are human in a terrible way. To be blunt, if cheating is to be reduced in magnitude, we have to change how we conceptualize it, because the current social pressures are clearly not doing anything.

I don't really have anything personal that's pertinent to share. I guess I was cheated on once, early in a relationship. Whatever, I also had to get up early for work that day, and that was more upsetting to me. I recognize that this is not normal.

The Star Wars EU had some good stuff in it, but you had to sift through a lot of crap.

Shivahn

DevoutlyApathetic wrote: »

Bogart wrote: »

I now find it's illegal in some countries (mostly the ones you'd expect) and I guess some states in the US. Nowhere in Europe criminalises it.

Adultery remains a criminal offense in 21 states, although prosecutions are rare.

Astonishing, though I guess they don't prosecute and keep it on the books to maybe assuage religious types? I dunno. Consensual hanky-panky with an adult doesn't seem like it should be a crime in a modern country. It makes you a dirty cheater, but an actual criminal?

It's still on the books because we never go through and clean up outdated laws and repealing it is horrible optics for a politician (i.e. "Pro-Adultery!"). It's pretty much never prosecuted.

It's also just a lot to ask. It's fifty separate governments that would have to repeal the more widely spread stuff.

TL DR

Xaquin wrote: »

TL DR wrote: »

Xaquin wrote: »

Bogart wrote: »

I'm pretty sure adultery isn't illegal. Grounds for divorce doesn't mean it's illegal.

fair enough I guess

If the intentional breaching of a marriage contract isn't considered illegal

It can be a factor in legal proceedings related to divorce, but it's not illegal. Any real 'breach of contract' stuff would involve a separate prenuptial agreement as opposed to the vast majority of marriages.

I'm fairly sure that 'no cheating' is pretty standard for marriage. Which is why it's immediate grounds for divorce.

In almost all states in the US, no-fault divorce is a thing and justification is unnecessary.

Xaquin

TL DR wrote: »

Xaquin wrote: »

TL DR wrote: »

Xaquin wrote: »

Bogart wrote: »

I'm pretty sure adultery isn't illegal. Grounds for divorce doesn't mean it's illegal.

fair enough I guess

If the intentional breaching of a marriage contract isn't considered illegal

It can be a factor in legal proceedings related to divorce, but it's not illegal. Any real 'breach of contract' stuff would involve a separate prenuptial agreement as opposed to the vast majority of marriages.

I'm fairly sure that 'no cheating' is pretty standard for marriage. Which is why it's immediate grounds for divorce.

In almost all states in the US, no-fault divorce is a thing and justification is unnecessary.

well, yes, but a divorce due to things like adultery can take as little as a month and can have consequences like loss of alimoney and other benefits.

Feral

I think the circumstances of an indiscretion can justify outing the indiscretion.

However, there is no way that the circumstances of 37 million people are all uniform enough to all justify being outed.

And "outing" doesn't necessarily entail "outing to the public at large," it could entail "outing to the cheater's spouse."

I only post this because there is a nonzero chance somebody will make a false equivalency between the "outing is wrong" positions expressed above and some other thread about cheating.

Shivahn

You can lose alimony for infidelity?

That really rubs me the wrong way. Infidelity is orthogonal to its purpose.

Xaquin

Shivahn wrote: »

You can lose alimony for infidelity?

That really rubs me the wrong way. Infidelity is orthogonal to its purpose.

can .... not always.

Elki

Daedalus wrote: »

So, another interesting note in this whole fiasco is that Ashley Madison also sold a "service" where you'd pay them twenty bucks and they'd promise to delete all your personal information from their system. This "service" brought in a couple million dollars in revenue.

It turns out that AM didn't actually do that second part, and the hackers have the names, addresses, and credit card numbers of everyone who paid for deletion.

In their last statement, they disputed this.

Contrary to current media reports, and based on accusations posted online by a cyber criminal, the “paid-delete” option offered by AshleyMadison.com does in fact remove all information related to a member’s profile and communications activity. The process involves a hard-delete of a requesting user’s profile, including the removal of posted pictures and all messages sent to other system users’ email boxes. This option was developed due to specific member requests for just such a service, and designed based on their feedback.

However, I think the whole idea was stupid. Instead of having a paid-delete, they should have held to the minimum amount of information needed, and made it as easy as possible for their clients to request deletions. They chose to view the data as a store of revenue, and not the huge risk that it is, and now they're stuck holding a bag of shit.

HamHamJ

I wouldn't be surprised if their deletion method was inadequate but not deliberately so.

Elki

HamHamJ wrote: »

I wouldn't be surprised if their deletion method was inadequate but not deliberately so.

I notice their statement makes no mention of credit card details, or transaction history.

Shivahn

I'm on my phone, which gets weird when there is too much text so I won't quote, but my thoughts are basically the same as Elki's. Running a service like this is incredibly risky and hacking is inevitable. They really should have collected as little data as possible and scrubbed things the second they were done.

Reznik

My take: data breaches resulting in the leak of private citizens' personal information are bad, regardless of if those people happen to be cheating on their spouses or not. Companies collecting data have an obligation to protect that data and neither random hackers nor the public at large have the right to that data. I don't think the hackers are being especially noble about this, although it sounds like this company is run by a bunch of fucking scumbags so screw them. But that doesn't really give these guys license to ruin the lives of several million people (...a part of me finds this hard to type because in the back of my mind I'm going 'but the cheaters ruined their own lives, so...')

Now, from a... moral? emotional? whatever point of view, I don't really give a shit about a bunch of cheaters being exposed because I have a pretty hardline anti-cheating view so I suppose there's some schadenfreude going on.

On the other hand, I guess a good thing coming out of this is the fact that those exposed should be able to sue the everloving shit out of Ashley Madison both for not protecting their data and not deleting data when actually fucking paid to do it.

I can't get over that last part. Holy shit, what scumbags.

JacksWastedLife

Xaquin wrote: »

Shivahn wrote: »

You can lose alimony for infidelity?

That really rubs me the wrong way. Infidelity is orthogonal to its purpose.

can .... not always.

Yeah, what?

Most states have a "No Fault" divorce which allows you to file on grounds of irreconcilable differences. The need to prove fault is for states that will not grant a divorce without cause, and thus adultery becomes a reason for cause.

Divorce is weird, even when you petition jointly, in an amicable or settled situation, the state can refuse you your request and force you to remain married.

Disco11

I'm curious what the ratio of men to women on there is. Most dating sites or "lifestyle" sites my wife and I have been on are something like 10-1.

zepherin

Shivahn wrote: »

You can lose alimony for infidelity?

That really rubs me the wrong way. Infidelity is orthogonal to its purpose.

I find that I disagree. From a purely contractual standpoint this makes sense.

We are married and that implies a covenant of good faith, and part of that implies that one side isn't going to cheat on the other. Cheating by one side is a breech of contract. Alimony in this regard is contractual and based on the assumption that one party is going to take a hit career wise because of the marriage (by taking care of the household). If a party breeches contract, they should not benefit from it as well.

Daedalus

Elki wrote: »

Daedalus wrote: »

So, another interesting note in this whole fiasco is that Ashley Madison also sold a "service" where you'd pay them twenty bucks and they'd promise to delete all your personal information from their system. This "service" brought in a couple million dollars in revenue.

It turns out that AM didn't actually do that second part, and the hackers have the names, addresses, and credit card numbers of everyone who paid for deletion.

In their last statement, they disputed this.

Contrary to current media reports, and based on accusations posted online by a cyber criminal, the “paid-delete” option offered by AshleyMadison.com does in fact remove all information related to a member’s profile and communications activity. The process involves a hard-delete of a requesting user’s profile, including the removal of posted pictures and all messages sent to other system users’ email boxes. This option was developed due to specific member requests for just such a service, and designed based on their feedback.

However, I think the whole idea was stupid. Instead of having a paid-delete, they should have held to the minimum amount of information needed, and made it as easy as possible for their clients to request deletions. They chose to view the data as a store of revenue, and not the huge risk that it is, and now they're stuck holding a bag of shit.

Their denial is horseshit. They are saying "well, we never said that the paid delete option would delete your personally identifiable payment history, so we did nothing wrong." This is directly contrary to what a reasonable person would expect the paid delete option to do. It's basically fraud, just like their "Ashley's Angels" fake account scheme was.

Shivahn

Alimony is less part of the contract - after all, it only kicks in when the contract is terminated - and more a recognition by the state that the contract can be exploitative in the long term when terminated.

This is sort of tangential to cheating though, I guess. It just surprised me it was a thing.

Julius

Daedalus wrote: »

Elki wrote: »

Daedalus wrote: »

So, another interesting note in this whole fiasco is that Ashley Madison also sold a "service" where you'd pay them twenty bucks and they'd promise to delete all your personal information from their system. This "service" brought in a couple million dollars in revenue.

It turns out that AM didn't actually do that second part, and the hackers have the names, addresses, and credit card numbers of everyone who paid for deletion.

In their last statement, they disputed this.

Contrary to current media reports, and based on accusations posted online by a cyber criminal, the “paid-delete” option offered by AshleyMadison.com does in fact remove all information related to a member’s profile and communications activity. The process involves a hard-delete of a requesting user’s profile, including the removal of posted pictures and all messages sent to other system users’ email boxes. This option was developed due to specific member requests for just such a service, and designed based on their feedback.

However, I think the whole idea was stupid. Instead of having a paid-delete, they should have held to the minimum amount of information needed, and made it as easy as possible for their clients to request deletions. They chose to view the data as a store of revenue, and not the huge risk that it is, and now they're stuck holding a bag of shit.

Their denial is horseshit. They are saying "well, we never said that the paid delete option would delete your personally identifiable payment history, so we did nothing wrong." This is directly contrary to what a reasonable person would expect the paid delete option to do. It's basically fraud, just like their "Ashley's Angels" fake account scheme was.

I would actually expect them to keep my payment history, as I figure they would probably need to record that stuff for tax-purposes or something.

I mean, you pay them for a service and then they delete any record of that payment ever happening? How are they going to explain where the money came from?