If I could retroactively advise men on how to stay faithful to their wives, I could offer no better counsel than for them to have signed up with Ashley Madison in the 2010s. The "cheating website," where married folks would theoretically hook up with other married folk for red hot trysts, served no useful purpose other than to give the illusion of infidelity to gullible men. Many a marriage may have been saved by its service!
The website, which still exists in nominal form, now enjoys the privilege of being profiled in yet another overlong, cutesy Netflix documentary. Netflix documentaries generally result in misfortune for their viewers, but with the aid of the fast forward button, this one does reluctantly yield a bit of insight: it appears no one on Ashley Madison ever found another human being to fool around with.
I'm no Errol Morris, but you'd think this sort of virtual blue-balling - which seemed to have come at considerable expense to the would-be Bill Clintons - would've been worthy of further examination. It does not come. There are about five minutes out of the three-hour run devoted to the notion that the men who signed up texted with chatbots and Ashley Madison employees and that's it.
The documentary provides plenty of evidence that its members desired extramarital assignations. It provides zero they were physically unfaithful. Of the 37 million members Ashley Madison asserted it had, the documentarians found a total of no dudes who signed up, made a date, and had sex with an insatiable wandering tigress, all while the wife remained blissfully unaware. (It's also telling the filmmakers couldn't find one example of extortion related to the service. If people had been hooking up, Ashley Madison would've been an extortion machine.)
There's one religious couple whose husband signed up but did not score; he explored more traditional territory for infidelity - at work, friends, etc., etc. Another couple interviewed had an open marriage; the wife didn't use the site, though she thought it a terrific idea, while her husband claimed to have one encounter in an "if you say so" moment in the doc. Another woman discovered her husband was on Ashley Madison; when his membership was revealed, he promptly committed suicide. Again, no evidence whatsoever he was unfaithful with the aid of the site. And that's the long and short of it.
As is Netflix's wont, there's plenty of filler. I wasn't keeping count, but it's my guess the narrative paused at least a half-dozen times to inform us that infidelity is a horrendous breach of trust and often ruinous to a marriage. (I guess you can't say that enough!) There are tons of clips, each the same as the other, of CEO Noel Biderman appearing on CNBC and other cable channels watched by dozens where he asserts glibly that he's doing us all a favor by enabling spouses to blow off some steam in order to keep a marriage vibrant. Since he claimed to be monogamous and often appeared with his wife, his spiel was effective in a marketing degree from Wharton sort of way - and if you're a fucking idiot. What he was really doing is providing rhetorical absolution for his customers. (As it turns out, Biderman was banging every hooker in Canada and points south, the documentary alleges. Against all odds, he is still married.)
Less filler and more filling is the website getting hacked by a still-anonymous hacker "team" calling itself The Impact Group. It didn't ask for money. It merely asked for the website to be shut down completely. Ashley Madison management, somewhat understandably, didn't want to reward blackmail and refused. The client list was subsequently revealed, as well as other corporate documents and emails. Since all the mayhem stems from this, rather than actual infidelity, it's the most interesting part of the doc.
What Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal delivers is an off-the-rack morality tale, obviously, but it games the moral by downplaying the inescapable conclusion that all the men who signed up - and it's pretty clear almost all of the clients were men - were played for chumps. No need to muddy the waters! It's not a defense of playacting at infidelity to note it's a venial sin compared to the real thing. It's simply reasonable to ask that a documentary about infidelity be faithful to the truth.
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