All the burning questions I have about the Ashley Madison hack following Annalee Newitz's article on Gizmodo

If you don't know, recently Ashley Madison (a website marketing itself as a destination for those interested in having an affair) got hacked and as a result, all of its information was spilled forth for people to sift through. Caught up in the scandal are some celebrities, but Gizmodo/io9 writer Annalee Newitz went a step further and investigated the data to uncover some startling statistics that I can't get out of my head.

For one, there are literally millions and millions of accounts and nearly all of them are men or fake accounts made by the employees of Ashley Madison for the sole purpose of impersonating women to perpetuate their con. Ms. Newitz even discovered that of the female accounts that do exist, only about 1,500 were actively checking messages. This in comparison to some 33 million male accounts. I had so many questions as to what's going on here. Questions like: why is the ratio of men so high? Are men biologically programmed for deceit or is something else going on here? And if we do accept that men are biologically programmed for deceit, how would that cause you to raise a boy differently as per se a girl? Would it be harder to raise a boy to be a responsible young man so as to steer him straight from being just another future statistic on an Ashley Madison-type clone in the not-so-distant future?

And then my thoughts turned to such topics as "open marriage" and "polygamy" (hey I live in Utah) and by extent "polyamory" and "open relationships." I started to wonder if the dynamics of "more than one" evolved to placate men (specifically) and not women because with so few women having active accounts on Ashley Madison, my conclusion is that most women are satisfied with their marriages. I suppose I shouldn't be shocked because the United States is a patriarchy, and as unfortunate as that fact tends to be it means that women have been placating the needs of men for centuries. It's just that I've never noticed it as much as I did when I started reading the statistics that Ms. Newitz was posting on Gizmodo.

And then there are gay male relationships to consider. Long term relationships in the gay community do exist, but I would almost say they are "unicorns" in the same manner as Wall Street refers to a billion dollar startup as a "unicorn." In other words, most businesses fail, and I think the same is true of gay relationships (male not female). Why? Because they are comprised of two men and men are (as Ashley Madison statistics show) overwhelmingly deceitful. So yeah, it makes sense that long term gay relationships are rare.

But what about the fraud that the website perpetrated? There's that too. I mean, Ashley Madison was perfectly marketed to its audience. It was a honey pot that attracted enough men that it generated $140 million in profits in 2014 alone. And what were they paying for? Newitz points out that the entire website was a dystopia. It billed itself as a social network but none of the members on the site could be social without paying for that privilege. You couldn't even check your messages without paying money, and it turns out, when you did you were just conversing with a bot...a fake account...meant to string you along and fleece your pockets. If you wanted to quit the site, they withheld your information unless you actually paid them to erase it (kind of like blackmail). And as it turns out, even if you paid they kept your information anyway. So the customers were liars and deceitful bastards and the owners of the website were also liars and deceitful bastards. It's just that one was "outfoxing" the other, and that I suppose is either really sad or pure genius in that it netted $140 MILLION DOLLARS.

I hope some of you will read this and comment and tell me whether you too are fascinated by any of this. We sure live in interesting times.