posted
Ashley Madison is a dating agency that services married people who want to engage in adultery. Now that this agency is running ads on on television (see here and here ) is it safe to say that adultery has become mainstream?
posted
In order to call adultery 'mainstream,' you would first have to call prostitution and teen sex mainstream, since Americans view adultery as being less moral than either.
Yes, the institution of marriage has been getting very broken for a while now. Our customs and our tendencies involving marriage drive these high levels of infidelity. people marry people that they should not marry because they feel they are 'supposed to get married,' rather than marrying if and when they have lived with a person long enough to know that they have long-term emotional and sexual compatibility. Now most marriages will have infidelity or otherwise dissolve when people end up in a culturally expected marriage that does not actually have long-term compatibility. When these marriages persist because one or more parties in the marriage feel pressured to remain in these marriages due to social stigmas and taboos against divorce, a lot of adultery happens. American subcultures which create the most social pressure for marriage usually maintain artificially low divorce rates by heavily stigmatizing divorce, and that's one of the things that traditionally contributes to high levels of adultery. According to the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy, the majority percentage of married men AND women will have an extramarital affair at some time in their marriage.
I guess you could help this with the alteration of a lot of our cultural customs involving marriage. Right now, they're not good. The thing is, though, is that a lot of our cultures (especially the religious ones!) would utterly refuse to acknowledge that their attitudes on marriage and their expectation that people should GET married should be altered.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Now that this agency is running ads on on television (see here and here ) is it safe to say that adultery has become mainstream?
Only if you think drinking soda with globs of gelatin in it, or sucking your hair into a giant vacuum with internal blades, counts as "mainstream."
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: In order to call adultery 'mainstream,' you would first have to call prostitution and teen sex mainstream, since Americans view adultery as being less moral than either.
Yes, the institution of marriage has been getting very broken for a while now. Our customs and our tendencies involving marriage drive these high levels of infidelity. people marry people that they should not marry because they feel they are 'supposed to get married,' rather than marrying if and when they have lived with a person long enough to know that they have long-term emotional and sexual compatibility. Now most marriages will have infidelity or otherwise dissolve when people end up in a culturally expected marriage that does not actually have long-term compatibility. When these marriages persist because one or more parties in the marriage feel pressured to remain in these marriages due to social stigmas and taboos against divorce, a lot of adultery happens. American subcultures which create the most social pressure for marriage usually maintain artificially low divorce rates by heavily stigmatizing divorce, and that's one of the things that traditionally contributes to high levels of adultery. According to the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy, the majority percentage of married men AND women will have an extramarital affair at some time in their marriage.
I guess you could help this with the alteration of a lot of our cultural customs involving marriage. Right now, they're not good. The thing is, though, is that a lot of our cultures (especially the religious ones!) would utterly refuse to acknowledge that their attitudes on marriage and their expectation that people should GET married should be altered.
posted
While I don't think one service can make something 'mainstream', I also don't see how mainstream follows a line of morality, that is, if one thing is disapproved of but 'mainstream', it automatically means everything less disapproved of than that is also mainstream.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
What about adultery with a teenage prostitute?
Okay, seriously... I've seen similar things on the web, but you can find just about anything on the web, frequently without looking for it or even having the slightest desire to ever see anything remotely like it. But it is kind of disturbing to see such a thing on television, as television- by way of its entry costs, if nothing else- tends to be more of a "mainstream" medium. It also means that someone responsible for ad buys felt they could show it without turning viewers away in droves, which is in and of itself kind of disturbing. One sort of envisions a stereotypical "Jerry Springer" audience, nineteen of whom are sort of snickering into their palms about What kind of jackass would solicit that kind of service... and the twentieth, who is covertly noting the number. Banner ads can and do come up with amazing and ridiculous things in their vast lottery-like selections, but someone really thought it was okay to lock in x number of seconds to actively advertise to would-be adulterers. Hmm.
I suppose it begs the question of how widespread something has to be to qualify as "mainstream", especially in the digital age. I don't think it's mainstream in the sense of "Oh, hey, Joe, how's the mistress; Hi, Mary, how's that piece you picked up after work treatin' ya"; but the willingness to broach the subject in a widely available advertisement does suggest that perhaps the subject is becoming less taboo.
I'd also suggest it's dangerous to say "Americans disapprove of x, more than y, less than z"; I'm sure you can find places where the use of prostitutes is still considered some kind of rite of passage or acceptable way to "blow off steam", or that teenagers are just "doing what comes naturally", or even that so-and-so isn't actually coming home late from "work", but that's all on the QT. There's quite a range, think of it all what one will.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:I'd also suggest it's dangerous to say "Americans disapprove of x, more than y, less than z";
Not really. Moral distaste is something that can be methodologically polled for with very low margins of error. Certifiably, americans are generally more tolerant of prostitution and teenage sex than they are of adultery and they consider adultery the more immoral act of the three.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
By mainstream, do you mean more acceptable or do you mean more common? Either way, my answer is no, I don't see this as making it more mainstream. Adultery has always existed. It has never been entirely shunned or accepted...existing on the fringe of society.
Posts: 2392 | Registered: Sep 2005
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