I was at the gym when a commercial came on and caught my attention. I had my iPod earbuds in and the commercial wasn’t captioned, but you don’t need sound to get the idea.
Here’s the premise: A guy wakes up from a night of serious drinking, he’s in bed with a very large and unattractive woman, and he slips out of bed, grabs his stuff and sneaks down the stairs -- clearly trying to forget this ever happened. He’s almost out the door when he gets an overwhelmingly disappointed look on his face and the camera cuts to a wedding photo of him and the very gal he spent the night with.
At this point I’m thinking it’s got to be a Vegas ad or something along those lines, but the scene cuts to the site AshleyMadison.com and the tag "Life is short. Have an affair."
I looked around the gym wondering if I’d actually seen it or if I’d spent a little too much time sweatin’ to the oldies and hallucinated the whole thing. Confused and curious, I couldn’t help looking up the site when I got home. OnMilwaukee.com did a story on the site in March.
We’ve all seen the dating site commercials on television full of happy couples that met online and got married and just can’t get enough of each other. Two souls became one and ... blah, blah, blah. Well, through my investigating I discovered this is not one of those sites. AshleyMadison.com is a service for those that are married, plan to stay that way, and are actively looking to have an affair.
Pause for reaction …
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I had no idea such sites existed. I’m not naïve about the adultery statistics, but this was an approach I’d never seen. When you go to the homepage, you have to have an account to log in and search around through the eligible and willing parties (you enter your relationship status but you do not have to be married, that’s just their biggest selling point).
They also have many of their commercials, most of which I admit are pretty funny at first viewing, as well as a lot of the media attention CEO Noel Biderman has received since the sites creation in 2001. The site actually guarantees "an affair to remember or your money back."
Now, that’s romance. But with a claim of more than 4 million members, you have to wonder, as depressing as it may be, there might be something to this. His argument for the service, though unavoidably sleazy, is compelling and in case you were wondering he is married and has two children. I’d be very curious to meet his wife.
By the way, the script to the commercial I saw at the gym is "Most of us can recover from a one night stand with the wrong woman ... But, not when it’s every night." Another one of their ads was banned from airing during the Super Bowl in February. That one is very creative, probably because it is directed at women. Either way, it’s worth a peek. (I’m referring to the television commercial not the print ad, that one is hellacious.)
The idea is basically the same as the singles dating sites, but the media is geared solely to married people and in theory you are just having a physical relationship with your AshleyMadison lover while you carry on with your marriage. These are people that are supposedly unhappy in their marriages but do not want to get divorced for one reason or another.
One woman’s reasoning was she finally got fed up with her husband because he never wanted to have sex. She felt unattractive, unwanted and unloved and according to her, found just what she was looking for on this site. Another woman says that she thinks her husband is a great guy, but finds him boring. These women maintain the other aspects of their marriages while screwing someone else. This isn’t exactly a new concept, but the concept of advertising it certainly is.
One media clip is from a Biderman appearance on "The View." No shocker that a studio full of mostly married women were just waiting to beat this guy senseless in the parking lot and without fail, part-time talk show host, full-time idiot and "happily married" baby machine Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s argument was "Why not make a site that concentrates on helping people work through the problems in their marriage rather than supplying married men and women with an outlet for adultery?"
Well, first of all I doubt that would be the same lucrative business that this obviously is (come on, the guy isn’t in this because he’s got a conscience). Second, because these people clearly don’t want to work on those problems and for some incredibly stupid reason refuse to keep divorce as an option. Probably because it’s a great excuse to screw someone else.
No divorce? OK, how about counseling, separating or I don’t know... sharing some of these frustrations with the person you vowed to live with through eternity? Having an affair doesn’t save your marriage; it just delays your divorce. Now rip that Band-Aid off already!
Biderman’s theory is that a controversial commercial is not going to make someone have an affair, and I agree. If people subscribe to the services of AshleyMadison.com, it’s because they already had the idea in mind they just weren’t sure how to get it accomplished.
What I’m a little shakier on is the argument that people are not meant to be monogamous and therefore we shouldn’t look at adultery in such a negative light. I’ve given this concept a lot of thought and have touched on it in earlier blogs. As our most basic selves, mammals, we are here to procreate to continue the species.
We have a population threatening the very viability of our planet so I think we have that whole procreation thing covered. However, we are also in theory the most intelligent and advanced creatures Mother Nature ever created and therefore have the ability to use our brains as well as our emotions when it comes to our relationships. Some supposedly lesser creatures actually mate for life, so what’s our problem?
Whether you agree with that or not is only part of the real question. By allowing these sites and allowing their advertisements to be shown to the masses, are we supporting adultery?
Perhaps this is just the necessarily ugly reflection of our society that we’ve been avoiding. It’s not a chicken-and-egg conundrum; adultery has been around forever, sites like AshleyMadison.com just create the supply to fill our demand.
No, the OnMilwaukee.com sex columnist's real name is not Sarah Foster. (Foster is the model/actress that played an ex-lover of Vincent Chase in the first season of "Entourage.") In reality, our sex columnist is a Wisconsin native with a degree in journalism and a knack for getting people to talk to her.
Sarah never considered herself an "above average" listener. Others, however, seem to think differently. Perhaps she has a sympathetic tone or expression that compels people to share their lives and secrets with her despite how little they know her. Everyone from the girl that does her hair to people in line at the grocery store routinely spill the details of their lives and relationships to Sarah, unprompted but typically not unwanted. It’s strange to her that people would do this, but she doesn’t mind. Sarah likes that she can give advice even if it is to complete strangers.
So why the pseudonym? Simple. People tell Sarah these things because for some reason they trust her. They believe she cares and therefore will keep their secrets in a locked vault the same way a best friend or therapist would. Sarah won't name names, but that vault is now unlocked.
