Ottawa: The hotbed of hot beds?

Buttoned-down Ottawa is getting attention as the town cheating didn’t forget. And the international media won’t let us forget, either.

The infidelity website Ashley Madison (tag line: “Life is short. Have an affair”) told the National Post in February that one in five Ottawa residents has an account. But the number didn’t start ricocheting around the Internet until a hacker threatened to release confidential user information from the website’s database.

The Ottawa statistic strained the credulity of the rest of the world. “The town that fun forgot tops on infidelity website,” said the news service Reuters.

Britain’s Mail Online quipped: “Is Ottawa the most adulterous city on earth?” and Asia News International said Ottawa was “exposed” as the world’s cheating capital.

Comedian John Oliver turned the statistic into a joke on his U.S. show: “Ottawa, you cannot let this skeezy website destroy your marriages. Don’t take this lying down beneath some mulleted stranger wearing a wedding band,” he said in a segment featuring a montage of hockey players, a moose and middle-aged men raking their lawns.

This weekend, the BBC News expressed skepticism that Ottawa could really be a hotbed of cheating. “The contradiction between the capital city’s strait-laced reputation and Ashley Madison’s numbers is staggering.”

The skepticism is warranted. Last February, Ashley Madison said it has 189,810 users in the Ottawa area, a city with a population of 883,000. Statistics Canada says there are abut 200,000 families in Ottawa with a married or commonlaw couple. As John Oliver jokingly pointed out: look to your left, look to your right, look at yourself. Every one of you is on Ashley Madison.

And then there’s the question of how many married people actually have affairs — or will admit to it.

Estimates have varied widely. In 1976, sex educator Shere Hite said three-quarters of women married more than five years reported having an affair. In 1990, the Kinsey Institute said it was 37 per cent of men and 29 per cent of women. A University of Chicago study released in 1993 said about 21 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women admitted to having an affair.

Ottawa sex therapist Sue McGarvie believes there’s a kernel of truth to Ashley Madison’s Ottawa numbers. The Vanier Institute of the Family says four in 10 Canadian marriages end in divorce. Matrimony is a “failing experiment,” she says.

‘The growth part of my business is married people who want to know, ‘Is this is the kind of sex I will get for the rest of my life?’ And it’s not a happy thing. If you have a need, it’s not going to go away.”

Ottawa is stodgy by day, but steamy at night, according to McGarvie. Here’s her anecdotal evidence: Ottawa has a disproportionate number of dominatrixes for a city of its size. “I know eight. For a city like this, that’s a lot.” Ottawa has the highest per capita number of burlesque troupes in North America. “I was taking a class and it was full of middle-aged women who want to shake their tassels,” says McGarvie. Ottawa has three swingers’ clubs. Marc Clairoux owns the eastend members-only swingers’ club Obsession. He says a previous club he opened five years ago had more than 2,000 couples as members. The current club, which opened last October, has almost 1,000 couples, he reports.

“I think there is a growing trend away from monogamy and opening up to affairs and polyamory and other lifestyle choices,” he says. “So many people are not staying with lifelong partners, but are moving on.”

Clairoux says his members tend to be well-to-do people with families and mortgages. “They don’t want to split up, but they don’t want to stay with one partner.”

His theory? In a town like Ottawa with so many people concentrated in the civil service, social trends spread more quickly.

McGarvie says she has put four or five people on Ashley Madison herself.

“Two have partners who are terminally ill. They’re not having sex and they have a need,” she says. “Be careful how you judge people who are on there.”

I was taking a class and it was full of middle-aged women who want to shake their tassels.