Ashley Madison Full Of Desperate Men, Fake Women — Should We Pity Duped Adulterers?


It’s hard not to chuckle sadistically at this: The men who signed on to Ashley Madison hoping to start an illicit affair with a sexy stranger were swindled.

A Gizmodo writer took a look at Ashley Madison’s data on its millions of male and female users and found that the site was pretty light on women — in fact, women were almost non-existent. The company has already admitted to a bit of gender inequality: it boasts 31 million male users and only 5.5 million women.

Most of those female profiles, this analysis suggests, were either fake or real women whose interest in the adultery site stopped after they signed up. As Annalee Newitz pointed out, some of these women were likely flesh-and-blood humans, but signed up out of curiosity or to nail their philandering husbands. The real women made up perhaps 12,000 profiles.

And one thing appears certain: few of them were there to start an affair. Sorry, guys.

When the hacker group Impact Team outed Ashley Madison’s user data, they also claimed that thousands of female profiles weren’t real. Newitz tested that claim. Here are a few pieces of data.

Under the assumption that Ashley Madison users wouldn’t have a company email address, the author found that 10,000 accounts were attached to ashleymadison.com addresses. About 9,000 of these were attached to female accounts, and only 1,000 to men.

The IP address for 80,000 profiles were “home” addresses, meaning a local computer at Ashley Madison. The analysis found another gender disparity — 68,000 accounts created under that IP address were women, and 12,000 were men.

A data field that revealed how often an Ashley Madison user checked his inbox suggested that most of the men kept up with their messages, and only 1,500 women even bothered.

Another piece of data showed how often an Ashley Madison user chatted with another user. Sadly, 11 million guys chit-chatted with a prospective mistress, but who were they talking to? Only 2,400 women talked to anyone.

Finally, the data analysis showed 5.9 million men replied to messages and only 9,700 women ever did.

In other words, the data reveals a pretty pathetic story: the men were very active on the site, obsessively checking their inboxes and striking up chats. The women, on the other hand, were yawning. So the men on Ashley Madison were paying to fantasize about cheating, but never actually did.

So who are these fake ladies? Here’s one hint: A few years ago, an Ashley Madison employee sued the company because her wrists had been injured from creating so many fake profiles — about 1,000 in three months.

And according to a report in the Washington Post, fakery is extremely common on adult dating sites.

Industry consultant David Evans told the paper, “Ashley Madison has paid people to write profiles, and they’ve allowed fake profiles to proliferate on their site. Tons of sites are guilty of that. That’s not news.”

Here’s the problem. Sites built just for the purpose of facilitating hook-ups aren’t appealing to women and such sites need “pseudos” to attract paying customers, namely “desperate, oversexed, uninhibited dudes,” Caitlin Dewey wrote. Across all sites like Ashley Madison, less than 2 percent had female profiles. And profile-writing is actually a real job.

It’s all pretend, in other words, said Evans.

“Look at Fling.com or Adult Friend Finder, the two big sex and hook-up sites. You know after five minutes that there isn’t a single real woman on there. Somebody like Fling, they make money by BSing everything.”

While all this sounds infuriating and unjust — after all, such companies are defrauding users, an act that has caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission — should we feel very sorry for the duped men on Ashley Madison, who signed up just so they could cheat on their wives? A swindled adulterer isn’t exactly a sympathetic figure.

What do you think? Did these Ashley Madison users get their just desserts? Or does the company’s systematic fakery make you angry?

[Photo Courtesy Ashley Madison]

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