What surprises me most about the Ashley Maddison scandal is the cost of signing up for that promised affair. According to a report by Tony Maglio in The Wrap, (former) TV reality star Josh Duggar apparently paid $986.76 for two accounts on the philanderers’ site.
At those prices, illicit sex is only for the well heeled, I guess.
And two accounts? What does that imply, I wonder? Was he planning to cheat on the women he would be cheating with? Pretty devious even for Josh, who – as I’m sure you know – was recently exposed as a child molester.
You probably never heard of Ashley Maddison. So let me bring you up to date. Ashley Maddison is a web site that offers married individuals with a roving eye an opportunity to hook up with others who also hanker for a bit of hanky panky. Presumably, the trysts would be a deep and dark secret – certainly not shared by the participants’ significant others.
These trysts are secret no more. Hackers broke into the site’s database and dumped the hidden lives of 37 million cheaters (37 million!) online for all the world to see.
I overheard someone on TV say that divorce lawyers in America are already being deluged by would-be clients, presumably as a result of the data breach.
With those revelatons beginning to come out, with the shocking child porn case involving Subway spokesman Jared Fogle and with the case of the (then) 15-year-old student at St. Paul’s School who is accusing an older student of raping her, you have to wonder what’s going on in our society.
The Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy reports, for example, that nearly 50 percent of married women and 60 percent of married men will have an extramarital affair at some point in their marriage. That’s nearly double the statistics from 10 years ago.
Of course I know the flesh is weak, as the Bible reminds us. But with the relaxed moral code that’s prevalent today, you have to wonder why there’s so much bizarre behavior in the news.
Who in their right mind would pay hundreds of dollars to join a web site so they can meet members of the opposite sex who might want to have sex with them? What is it that makes adults want to molest children? Why is rape in the news almost every day?
And, to add to the strangeness, the deviants often belong to some kind of “family values” political group (like the Duggars).
It seems the more human beings preach about morality the more tempted we are to stray. Is perversity an inherent human trait? Are we still (sometimes irresistibly) tempted to take a bite of the forbidden apple?
I’ll leave it to you psychology students to figure that out.
Click for more on Josh Duggar.