Well, that’s just the thing—she’s not a she at all. Ashley Madison is a hookup site with a very specific type of hookup in mind: affairs for and with married people. (For the record, Ashley Madison is actually a dude—the site is run by a Canadian man.)

This site promises with a 100% guarantee that if you join, you will have an affair. Sure, plenty of people find them all on their own everyday, without paying a fee for a special infidelity-driven social networking site. But for $49 you can get a basic membership, and for $249 you get the Affair Guarantee Package, which offers your money back if you don’t find a little something on the side within three months. Well, at least it’s a site with solid business ethics, right?

Sadly, I’d never even heard of Ashley Madison until I read a Vanity Fair article by a journalist who decided to do an undercover experiment to prove that “marriage and monogamy needn’t always go hand-in-hand.” Which is about as much breaking news as the recent development that crack is bad for you. So she, a single woman, went undercover on AshleyMadison.com as a young newlywed and had lots of hot extramarital sex and then wrote about it like it was news. Take that, Campbell Brown—no bias, no bull! Well, maybe a little...

So I clicked over to AshelyMadison.com. Once there, I saw the following words, smeared across the page in a classy, Victorian font:

“Life is Short. Have an Affair.”

And I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

According to the article, 50-65% of men and 45-55% of women have had an affair by age 40. And, let’s face it—that’s probably being conservative. Which apparently translates to big dollars—especially when you factor in current exchange rates.

As one of the undercover journalist’s Ashley Madison-procured beaus put it, “monogamy through adultery” is en vogue—and is saving marriages across the country; therefore Ashley Madison offers an invaluable service.

Is it me, or does that not even make any sense? The whole article left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

But, as any dedicated journalist would do, I decided to do a little research of my own to get to the bottom of this Ashley Madison phenomenon. A few stats: there are approximately 4.3 million members on the site to date (yes, really), and the majority of these members are married—although there is a portion of single people with profiles seeking an affair. Not surprisingly, there are more men looking for a tryst here, and women are typically bombarded with 100+ emails a day from married guys who lament that their wives don’t have sex with them anymore; or that they have an unspoken “agreement” with their wives wherein they get to have sex with others.

I have breasts. You have breasts (well, you do if you’re a woman, or Meatloaf in Fight Club). Women have breasts. What we do with them on the other hand, is our decision. Personally, I prefer to keep mine under wraps. There are, however, women who’ve fought for the legal right to be topless in public. Their argument is that if it’s legal for men to show their nipples, then it should be legal for them, too.

Really?

Now, I’m all for celebrating the human body and not being ashamed of our sexuality...but honestly, I don’t know if women prancing around with their boobs bouncing in the breeze is exactly in everyone’s best interest. To me, being inundated with too much bare boob is akin to watching a Vin Diesel marathon on TV—twice. Things blow up. Cars go fast. Something else blows up. It’s the same thing over and over. Eventually, the violence desensitizes to the point of banality. Here a tit, there a tit, everywhere a tit, tit…

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want humdrum boobies.

Call me old fashioned, but I was brought up to have a modicum of modesty—and there’s a good reason for that. It’s called “the tease.” All this in-your-face stuff numbs the senses and creates a callus on the libido you couldn’t get through with an army of Ped Eggs—and trust me, you don’t want one of them anywhere near your libido. A little mystery, anticipation—that’s the stuff mind-blowing sex is made of. If we go all topless, all the time, serious shit is going to go down, possibly resulting in the end of civilization (and healthy sex) as we know it. Okay, maybe I’m being a little dramatic
But it would be big—bigger than Sheyla Hershey’s.

See what I mean? This is a matter of public safety here.

It all began back in high school. The lines between friendship and sexual attraction began to blur between some of my girlfriends and I, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss them. Then I did. I chalked it all up to experimentation—you know, the Katy Perry Special. But as soon as the first kiss had left my lips, sweet and soft and so different from any other kiss I had ever had, I wanted more. I wanted to know whether her belly felt as soft as it looked and whether her breasts would feel the same as mine or different. And before I knew it, I had gone from experimentation to something more serious. But what exactly it was, I still didn’t know.

High school brought a few chance encounters with friends who were also curious about the whole girl-on-girl experience, and what resulted was a few threesomes, a couple of girly make-out sessions and a smattering of handholding, cuddling situations that certainly transcended your typical pubescent sleepover party behavior. I felt like I was finally ready to dive into the mysterious world of dating a woman—and Bonnie was the perfect candidate.

We worked together at a bookstore that shall remain nameless, me in the café and she among the stacks. She had long, blonde hair and skin that always looked like she had just washed her face. She never wore makeup and she dressed plainly, in jeans and tee-shirts, but I thought she was one of the most beautiful things I had ever laid eyes on. When I caught a glimpse of her pink triangle tattoo peeking out from under the strap of her tank top one hot day in July, I knew it was meant to be. I was going to ask this woman out on a date.

Porn.

Now, if you are a woman, this word may evoke a variety of feelings and emotions. Maybe you are like about half of the women I have interviewed and love watching porn: you think it’s sexy and fun and can’t get enough of it. Or maybe you are like the other half of my female interviewees: the thought of watching porn makes your stomach turn and your insecurities flare up like herpes, and you’d rather scrub the toilet while on your period wearing stilettos and a corset three sizes too small than sit through a porno.

The subject of porn within the relationship is an age-old issue among the sexes, and while some couples are duking it out over the prospect of watching porn together, some women are embracing it, realizing that it can be used to enhance their sexual experiences, not replace them, and finding that it really spices things up in the bedroom.

“I’m all for porn,” says Crystal, a 31-year-old married mother of two. “It usually makes the action in the bedroom better.” And mother of one, Sandra says “it helps me get in the mood.” Kelly, a married mother of three, takes it one step further. “Watching porn with my husband makes me feel liberated and sexy, and it gives us tons of ideas, positions, etc. to try to keep things interesting in our sex life. We often have limited time to get in the mood and get it on because of our kids, so watching a little bit of porn gets us both ready and tearing each others’ clothes off.”


REASONS WHY MOMS MIGHT LOVE THE PORN

1. It helps to scrub the images of Dora the Explorer off your brain so we stop singing “We did it, we did it, we did it, YEAH!” after a lovemaking session.
2. It’s not just for guys anymore—women make porn, too, like Candida Royalle or Tristan Taormino, for starters.
3. It’s a helluva lot more interesting than the 524 reality shows that have polluted the cable airways.
4. Why should the guys get to have all the porn fun?
5. It gives us ideas for new positions, tricks, and even lingerie. Since there isn’t a lot of inspiration on Noggin for those sorts of things.