Let's Talk Alt Love: A Poly Perspective of Ashley Madison & Dysfunctional Mononormativity

Let's Talk Alt Love Podcast on IPM Nation: Ashley Madison

By Ghia Vitale  & Leslee Petersen
QuailBellMagazine.com

At 10 PM tonight, the podcast“Let’s Talk Alt Love” debuts live on IPM Nation tonight! Until our website goes live, like us on Facebook! Hosted by Leslee Petersen and myself, this podcast is devoted to the teaching and discussion of healthy relationships in alternative lifestyles. For our first podcast, Relationship Coach Leslee Petersen and I will be discussing some issues surrounding Ashley Madison that reflect the dysfunctional presence of mononormativity in our culture. Our official website will be up shortly.

Ashley Madison is a dating site that caters specifically to a demographic that actively seeks out affairs. After Impact Team’s leaked the identities and personal information belogonging to Ashley Madison users to the public, 87,596 women signed up for the controversial service. 

This dating and social networking site makes it easy to find people who are willing and ready to engage infidelity-based relationships. Or so they thought. Since the hack, a lot has happened and as the events continue to unfold to reveal the presence of toxic mononormativity in our culture. 

The lives compromised are more than bots masquerading in fake profiles. LGBTQ users in countries like Saudi Arabia where the governments inflict the death penalty upon adulterers, homosexuals, and anyone who defies the heteronormative and mononormative culture in place. The Ashley Madison scandal raised the public's awareness about privacy and our culture's perpetuation of monogamy as a "default" state at all costs.

Here's some food for thought until we discuss issues surrounding Impact Team’s leaked information that everyone should be aware of when we discuss the issue at 10 PM on IPM nation.

AshleyMadison.com was launched in 2001. The website’s name combines 2 of the most popular girl names in 2001. They might as well have named the site “Jane Doe” because that’s basically Ashley Madison’s gist. Ashley Madison herself is not as much of an EveryWoman as much as she she is a figment of a corporate imagination.

1.) The Numbers Game & Its Players

Estimates of Ashley Madison’s usership range between 10 to 30 million men. Based on these estimations, anywhere between 1 out of 4 married men or 1 out of 6 American husbands in the United States used the Canada-based dating site actively. The leaked data revealed that U. S. men comprised not only the majority of the usership, but nearly its entirety as well; though the figures vary, all reports agree that over 90% of the users were men.

Ashley Madison created over 70,000 bots coded to lure men to the website with seemingly “intelligent” responses. Annalee Newitz of Gizmodo found “IP addresses that showed accounts were created from 127.0.0.1 and thousands of accounts that listed an AshleyMadison.com email address as their primary contact point. These email addresses were even listed in sequential, bot-like fashion — [email protected], [email protected], etc.”  Newitz also found that Ashley Madison recorded the people whom the bots messaged and the times at which they were listed in the database under the labels “bc_email_last_time,” “bc_chat_last_time,” and “reply_email_last_time.” 

Now, nearly 90,000 women have signed up for the matchmaking site. 

2.) Lawsuits, Lawsuits, Lawsuits

Ashley Madison deals dirty. The lawsuits combined total at $578 million class-action lawsuit against Avid Life Media and Avid Dating Life are the companies going to court forh failing to respect and protect the privacy of its users' personal information.  In many instances, they did not remove the information after people specifically paid the fee be completely erased from their database.

Doriana Silva, a former employee, claimed that she created 1,000 profiles of fake women within the span of her first 3 weeks as an employee. According to her 2012 lawsuit against the company, the workload caused a repetitive strain injury in her wrist. Though Ashley Madison is not the only site that regularly uses fake profiles to bait people into signing up, Ashley Madison did so to the extent where defrauded its own consumer base while abusing the staff.

3.) Governments Are Murdering People (Notably LGBTQ People And Woman)

The Ashley Madison leak is not only an infringement of privacy, but a literal matter of life and death for many. The public revealing of affair-seekers’ identities resulted in lost jobs and lost lives. I’m not just talking about the suicides you’ve heard about, either. In 2015, adultery remains illegal in 20 states. Although the law seldom pursues adulterers as criminals, other local and federal governments are much more strict about enforcing mononormative culture, the foundation of institutionalized monogamy. The leak compromises the lives of those who reside in countries where adultery is criminalized. 

If the geospatial data is correct, then 1,296 gay men logged in from regions in which monogamy and sexuality are matters of life and death. Adulterers in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and Nigeria face the threat of being stoned to death by law. In countries where adultery is a crime, women tend to receive punishments for committing adultery that far exceed the consequences of infidelity committed by men. But these legal system endorse pain as the method for punishing people for harmless sexual behaviors. Gay men like Reddit user ICouldBeStoned2Death used Ashley Madison to ensure that their encounters remained  discrete and out of public view. In other words, he leak jeapordized their lives.

While the United States is much more accepting of sexuality and LGBTQ people, the public was quick to scoff at Impact Team’s doings as acceptable or even deserved. And that is an attitude that we need to question before it strips us of our humanity, compassion, and open-mindedness.

#TheReal #AshleyMadison #TalkAltLove #Monogamy #Mononormativity #PolyPride #Cheating #ThePriceOfLove
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