FASCINATION WITH CHEATING,
Ashley Madison hacking forces us to confront our fascination with cheating
Calgary couples mediator Debra MacLeod was packing up to go on vacation Thursday morning when three frantic calls lit up her phone — “all three of them men, all three of them crying.”
They were clients of hers and members of AshleyMadison.com, the Canadian-based married dating and “discreet encounters” website targeted by a hack this week that blasted the personal information of its nearly 40 million users into cyberspace like shrapnel.
Two of her clients had hooked up with those they met on the site, they told her.
The other logged on for pure fantasy.
“All three of them said the same thing: ‘She doesn’t know, should I tell her, I don’t think she has a reason to go on (and search my name), but it’s just a matter of time,’” she said.
They were all “absolutely terrified” about being humiliated, about their kids being teased at school, about their professional and personal lives falling apart as a result of the leak — their private world on public display.
In the past days, news agencies and blogs have combed through the detritus of the initial Ashley Madison data explosion for highprofile members they can expose — the discovery that the now infamous reality TV star and family values activist Joshua Duggar paid nearly $1,000 for two accounts on the site providing some of the more salacious schadenfreude.
And while responses to the attack have ranged from “serves you right” to a shrug — the privacy breach more surprising and significant to people than the act of infidelity itself — the leak also forces us to confront our attitudes about infidelity in 2015.
The overwhelming response to the leak has been the “shaming” of people whose email addresses have been registered with the site — and that response may be revealing of how the Western world views infidelity.
“I might have said something different if this hack hadn’t happened, but to see so much glee and satisfaction over people getting busted as if they somehow deserved it and you don’t know their situation, to me, is pretty horrifying,” said Vicki Larson, co-author of The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels.
“I think it’s really missing the point of what the discussion should be right now and that is, ‘Is monogamy really working for us’?"
In her TED Talk titled Why Happy Couples Cheat, delivered this May in Vancouver, sex therapist Esther Perel said that while adultery has existed as long as the institution of marriage, “it’s never been easier to cheat and it’s never been more difficult to keep a secret.”
“And never has infidelity exacted such a psychological toll.”
Infidelity used to be a threat to a couple’s economic security, back when that’s all a marriage was really about, she said. “But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security.”
It also busts apart value systems upon which our society is built, thus exacting a very visceral reaction in people, Larson said. In some ways, Ashley Madison — with all of its intentionality, the way it enables the search for something socially illicit — violates more moral codes than just monogamy. And that’s scary.