Take a deep breath… get ready for the good news: Virtue is
alive and well in America.
Remember the Ashley Madison hack? The site’s users were
exposed just last week. But then, we discovered a gross disparity between the
number of men and women on the site. Apparently, women are far, far less apt to
cheat than are men.
It's one point against the feminists who believe that women like
sex just as much as men and that women should be having sex just like men.
Now, Gizmodo has crunched the numbers and has discovered
that Ashley Madison was more a fantasy factory than a hookup site. It was
promising something that it could not provide: affairs. It turns out that the
number of women on the site was far, far less than the numbers advertised. The vast
majority of profiles of female affair seekers were fake.
Gizmodo summarizes its research:
When
hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were
fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any
evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it
to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.
What I
discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place
than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on
their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract
those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional
future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has
replaced them with badly-designed robots.
Those
millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared
to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled
together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer,
the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it
became that none of them had ever
talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a
profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a
good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to
actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.
When
you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of
men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a
fantasy.
By now you will be slightly suspicious. If, by any chance,
your name had shown up on the list of Ashley Madison aficionados, what better
defense could you have than this one: you weren’t really having an affair because the women weren't real; you were
indulging a fantasy? Nothing could have happened because so few of the profiles
of women seeking affairs had been posted by actual women?
Whew.
Exception made for one special user named … Duggar.
HA! Funny stuff, but I don't know what conclusions you can find about the actual virtue of men or women.
ReplyDeleteWe should all expect women's sexual fantasties are more expressed through romance novels, The Bridges of Madison County, and all that, so did anyone think there was any chance that anonymous sexual hookups arranged online would be an ideal way to get women interested?
It does sound like the future of online sex probably will be of the robotic kind, Siri-chats. And perhaps Japan can help restore their economy by making a new line of robot women sex slaves to service desparate men.
Figuring out vice and virtue would seem to be getting harder and harder every year. Imagine the wild confessions the Catholic priests already have to endure in our brave new world...
A rather narrow definition of "virtue," I would say.
ReplyDeleteIf a woman treats her husband in the humiliating way that you provided examples of a few posts down, and knifes her co-workers in the back at work...but does not have any affairs..does she still possess virtue?
The classical definition of female virtue, of course, dealt primarily with sexual behavior, as opposed to the male definition, which dealt with things like courage and honor. I'd suggest that with the changes in sex roles, it is increasingly important that many of the classical characteristics of male virtue also become behavior expectations of women.
I was trying for irony... apparently, not very successfully.
ReplyDeleteVirtue is more honored in the breach than the observance.
ReplyDeleteI think such trends will cause the ecosystem will implode.
ReplyDeleteIt's all because of Climate Change.
ReplyDeleteNo, climate change is not necessary to implode the ecosystem. If women collectively hold out for more money and dead-things from a community of males who compete to get more money and dead-things then with sufficient population growth the ecosystem will implode. Currently the extinction of biological species is accelerating due to human development converting wilderness into track homes, parking lots, and shopping malls.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous @August 28, 2015 at 11:51 AM:
ReplyDeleteI was talking about virtue being alive and well in America as a consequence of Clinate Change.
You seem peculiarly humorless. If you think it's because of human development, maybe you need to face the music yourself and spare us all your lugubrious, misanthropic eco fantasy world. This is your opportunity to make your mark and set a shining example for decreasing the surplus population.
IAC,
ReplyDeleteI am merely interpreting Isaiah 5, 8-11, and other passages of scripture which set limits on the accumulation of wealth based on the principle of harmony with nature.
"Woe to you who join house to house, who connect field to field, until you are left alone to dwell in the midst of the land."
I read this as a prophecy of ecosystem collapse because people fail to recognize natural limits. Biologists now recognize why such prophecies episodically come true due to limits between human desires and real properties of the ecosystem in which we live.