wretched married male -- By Mark Morford

[madokie]

The fallout from the unabashedly silly Ashley Madison hack, the one that purportedly revealed the names and personal information of millions of lonely (or slimy, or heartless, or dishonest, perspective depending) married men who were lured like salivating moths to the site’s flame of tepid sexual fantasy, is a lot of things, but it’s surely one thing more than anything else: It’s just terribly, fascinatingly sad.

By most accounts, it appears the hackers were correct in their initial claims: most of the female accounts on Ashley Madison were fake; the men were cavorting alone. Annalee Newitz over at Gawker helpfully verified this via a detailed breakdown of the data (since updated and corrected to reveal even weirder numbers), calculating that, of the site’s 37 million total accounts, only about 12,000 apparently belonged to actual living, breathing females (the site claimed the number was more like 5.5 million), even fewer of which showed any activity whatsoever. Newitz’s correction takes the data in a new direction: While there might, in fact, be more women on the site than once assumed, one thing is for sure: more than 72,000 of the female accounts belonged to an army of very obnoxious automated fembots – and they did most of the chatting with the boys.

Bottom line: Terrible odds, boys. All those millions of lonely, older, surely mostly white men – politicians, pastors, salesmen, doctors, professions, Republicans and liberals, architects and dentists, this women’s heartless bastard and that woman’s lying scum – were howling their angst into a Void.

Put another way: not only were there millions of men who never had the slightest contact with a real female on Ashley Madison (or, presumably, anywhere else), they likely wouldn’t know what the hell to do if they did, and therefore are likely only on the site to dip the toe of their waning egos into a rather puerile, “Mad Men”-style fantasy of what it might be like to have a hot affair, but not actually follow through.

The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-and-the-howl-of-the-married-male/

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Nailed it.

Which is more than the vast majority of those guys ever did...

AM wasn't really anything new, just another iteration of the phone sex fake human interaction, but one that promised more and delivered even less, all while happily taking in the money.

[cwydro]

2. Pathetic. nt

[merrily]

3. 12,000 women and the rest of the 37 million were males? Oy.

[Raster]

5. We have another term for that:

it's called a GAY website.

[merrily]

7. How do you do that?

In the thread, I see your post as

5. We have another term for that:

www.gaywebsite.com

But after I click Reply, it appears as


5. We have another term for that:

it's called a GAY website.

How do you make that happen?

[Raster]

8. Hi there... My original post had the www line...

...which I thought was CERTAINLY NOT a valid website. I did a quick check, and yes it was a valid gay porn website. I revised my post. Your view was of the original post, but once you hit reply you "refreshed" your view and saw the updated post without the "www......

[merrily]

10. Thanks. I thought it was some cool secret I could play with.

Turns out, it was only me being an airhead. (You'd think that would be my first guess by now.)

[NJCher]

4. Morford

Last edited Wed Sep 2, 2015, 07:20 PM - Edit history (1)

Very interesting points he puts forward, and I encourage everyone to read the full piece.

The point that resonated with me is about how this culture pushes everyone into this mold of wife-husband-kids, and some people clearly don't fit into it. The result is aberrations, like this Ashley Madison thing. From the day I first heard about it, I thought that there wouldn't be many female takers on a deal like that. It goes against the grain of what women are made up of.

Then when they claimed their registrations were up due to all the publicity, I thought liars. Yeah, right, people are going to line up to have themselves exposed as lying, cheating scum.

Cher

[Raster]

9. Just my thoughts...

Straight porn is almost always (unless it is niche-oriented, i.e., straight porn for women created by women) FEMALE-centric because it is typically men who buy it and watch it. AM was just another type of straight fantasy porn FOR MEN. I'll even go further and state that despite the millions and millons of male accounts on AM, there certainly have not been millions and millions of affairs. Far. From. It.

And I agree with your basic premise: Ashley Madison basically goes against the grain of what women are made of.

[Solly Mack]

6. I agree. Sad.

[niyad]

11. mark was being very kind.

[treestar]

12. The odds might be bad on AM but

probably not in the real world. Which is why they probably were mostly fantasizing. They didn't want to do it for real, just think about it and get some thrills from that.

You always see those stats that say over half of married men cheat at least once, but then they are going on what men say, which their egos control. They may refuse to admit that they never cheater because they think that makes them weenies. The one thing that seems to be the biggest danger to society is the damn male ego. Even slightly hint he's afraid of or does not want violence, sex, whatever, and he's off to war.

[The2ndWheel]

13. Marriage is the attempt by society to give more men a chance

[taught_me_patience]

14. The article is a judgemental piece of shit

But the DU moralizers are going to love this.