Adultery Benefits Women? A Case For Ashley Madison
By jss posted
Add to that the fact that the women know they're going to be meeting people more likely to be understanding of their own situations and needs, and suddenly Ashley Madison can look like a boon for women, not a bane. Biderman goes so far as to say that the traditional view that women are more likely to be emotionally harmed by infidelity and economically harmed by divorce is paternalistic. And even when it's true, women have a right to options.
He's not alone in his thinking. In 1992, author Dalma Heyek filled The Erotic Silence of the American Wife with what at the time seemed like heresies: stories of women whose lives were not ruined by having affairs. She chronicled women who were not sorry, who were not punished for having sex out of wedlock. Two years later, In Tempted Women: The Passions, Perils and Agonies of Female Infidelity, Carol Botwin called adultery the "fastest growing women's sport" and attributed its increasing popularity, in part, to women having their own jobs, money, power. She called these women "The Groundbreakers." 4 Types Of Infidelity & How Affairs Help Marriage
One can only think that the frequency of extra-marital affairs has increased since then. Today, alongside the inevitable self-help books about how to survive infidelity for those who do not partake, we have Judith Brandt's The 50-Mile Rule: Your Guide to Infidelity and Extramarital Etiquette.
Experts say there are no reliable figures on how many marriages break down as a result of infidelity, and often it is more a symptom of a troubled relationship than the direct cause of divorce. Edivorcepapers.com claims that "17 percent of the divorces have infidelity as their origin." The site also says that "54 percent of married men and 70 percent of married women had no knowledge of the extramarital activities of their married partners." Are these accurate numbers? I don't know. They sound like good guesses, anyway. Why I Cheated
