Tim Chitwood: Shorten life by having an online affair
That Ashley Madison online adultery scandal was hilarious.
First, the very notion you can sign up online to have a "secret" affair is absurd. Hear that and you have to roll your eyes and think, "Oh yeah. No one EVER gets caught having an affair online!"
Beyond that, clients had to buy the pitch that swarms of attractive young women go online seeking affairs with married men. Those men might as well believe their email spam from "Bambi," the exotic dancer who wants to show them the tattoos her nightclub customers don't even get to see. All she needs is their credit card information to rent a room where they can hook up.
This just goes to show some men will buy anything that promises sex with a fresh consort. Toss them a lure and they're suddenly like naive old people who get online for the first time and start emailing Nigerian businessmen their bank account numbers to score an unclaimed fortune and sharing social media posts claiming Obama's a foreign-born Muslim secretly establishing "death panels" in federally subsidized nursing homes, as evidenced by the fact people in nursing homes keep dying.
The Ashley Madison website charged customers a monthly fee, promising to link them with others seeking recreational sex on the side, apparently an irresistible offer to millions of married men worldwide, whose identities became public as soon as hackers hit the website.
Millions of men, but not so many women.
Hard to believe, but some of Ashley Madison's female profiles were as fake as those Facebook friend requests you get from alleged women whose profile pages show only two bikini selfies depicting a buxom big-haired 20-something who has no background information other than she loves nude yoga and long mornings in bed with a man her weird uncle's age. Oh, and check out all your "mutual friends": other married men who already "liked" the bikini selfies.
What I found most intriguing about Ashley Madison and similar dating sites was the news they paid people to write female profiles. My first thought was, "How much?"
According to a piece in the Washington Post, one site paid about $25,000 a year -- with a bonus for those who were really good at it.
I think I could do that, having read the fake sex letters in men's magazines when I was young. The fiction always had a boilerplate pattern, starting with a hook line. ("As a female gymnast, I never dreamed of having sex with three men and a vacuum cleaner, but. ")
Such wild tales raised the question: Could people really be having all this spontaneous sex with someone they just met?
No, they couldn't. Not most people, anyway. Maybe some politicians and other government officials -- it's amazing what those people don't get away with -- but the rest of us don't just bump into
lingerie models at the coin laundry and get right between the freshly cleaned sheets with no strings attached.
In the unhappy end, the Ashley Madison hack showed some guys lack more than skepticism and fidelity. They're short on humility, too, if they really think being a state legislator (Georgia Rep. Allen Peake) or reality-TV star (Josh Duggar) impresses women so desperate for male companionship they seek it from married men online -- women who otherwise are so conscientious they would NEVER betray another woman's husband just to get on TV themselves, or extort money, or make their other lovers jealous.
Perhaps murderously jealous, the way jilted lovers often become in the real world, and not in online fantasies.
Some people who cheat on their spouses wind up divorced. Some wind up dead.
That could account for the Ashley Madison slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair."
Life is even shorter when you take stupid risks.
Tim Chitwood, tchitwood@ledger-enquirer.com, 706-571-8508.
This story was originally published September 13, 2015 at 10:01 PM with the headline "Tim Chitwood: Shorten life by having an online affair ."