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Why Nobody Should Ever Search The Ashley Madison Data

Genuine advice from one who has researched this purely for work reasons

4. It Is Morally Wrong To Even Look At The Ashley Madison Data. If You Have Looked At It You Are The Truly Evil One – Far Worse Than An Adulterer – And Nobody Should Or Will Care What You Say Or Think

Here's another hard, cold fact for all the judgemental Victorian moralistic prudes out there. Yes, a minority of Ashley Madison users do appear to have made use of the site to have sex outside their marriages or life partnerships. But the vast majority of this small minority were in fact totally justified in doing that.

Online comments all over the internet from such people prove conclusively that almost every single one of them was with a partner who was totally unwilling or unable to have any sex with them ever, despite every possible exertion by the AM user. Very often this was because of a serious and unforeseen medical condition (such as pregnancy or frigidity, for instance).

The huge majority of such AM users had been clearly and explicitly offered free permission by their spouses or partners to have sex outside the relationship. Almost without exception their testimony reveals that they have selflessly gone to great lengths to make sure that they did not contract a venereal disease from other AM users, even though they were not getting any sex whatsoever from their partners and therefore could not infect them, and nobody involved ever had more than one or two sexual partners who were for their part also in loving but open relationships.

Perhaps in a few cases some AM users may not have had permission from their spouses to play away, or their spouses may not have fully realised that they had implicitly, but nonetheless quite clearly, granted such permission.

But is it fair to selfishly deny a person sex? No. It is not, people have a right to have sex and if their spouses totally or somewhat-totally deny them that, they have every right to sleep with other people. Moralistic judgemental prudes may say that they should let their partner know clearly and unambiguously that they are doing so, but that is obvious bunk.

Many people are economically trapped in their loveless marriages, for instance, and won't someone, for goodness' sake, think of the children? Should a couple's children be forced to suffer through the hell of divorce just because one of their parents has decided for whatever reason to more or less give up on sex? Obviously not. In such cases the right and moral thing to do is have an affair, and avoid hurting your family by telling them things they don't want to know. After all, it's well known that the less painful, easier path is generally the more righteous one.

So even the tiny minority of AM users who actually have had affairs behind their partners' backs are GOOD people who have done NOTHING wrong. And yet their lives will be DESTROYED by people looking at the Ashley Madison data. They will lose their jobs – that's a well established fact, moralising judgemental bosses will sack employees for being AM users unless they are stopped by law. The US military, for instance – which attaches ludicrous and outdated importance to its members' abiding by their publicly sworn oaths – is conducting a vicious moralistic purge already.

So the truth is that looking at the Ashley Madison data is a far worse act than having an affair. What we actually need is a climate of moral outrage against the sort of judgemental Victorian prudes who would even look at it, not at the brave, righteous – and in many cases only tangentially or professionally involved – people identifiable in the AM data.

As the respected expert and professional investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald points out:

The Scarlet Letter, the 1850 novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne set in a Puritanical Massachusetts town in the mid-17th century ... chronicles the life of a woman who is found to have committed adultery ... as punishment, she is forced to stand before her village with the letter “A” attached to her dress ...

Take a woman who has two children with special needs, who has been out of the workforce for 15 years, and who is financially dependent on a husband who decided five years into their marriage that he was “done with sex” but refuses to allow her to have sex with anyone else ...

Or say you’re a gay man or lesbian forced through societal or religious pressure into a heterosexual marriage, and “cheating” is your only form of sexual fulfillment: Is that clearly morally wrong? If you’re a minister in Puritanical Boston, or Queen Victoria, bitter condemnation of adulterers in all cases may come easy ...

Whatever else is true, adultery is a private matter between the adulterer and his or her spouse. Except in the most unusual cases — such as a politician hypocritically launching morality crusades against others — it’s most definitely not any of your business.

As Greenwald shows us, it is far more morally wrong to invade someone's privacy than it is to have an affair behind your spouse's back. What does that mean for someone who suspects their partner may have had an affair?

Quite simply this. By looking at the Ashley Madison data you will almost certainly see other people named apart from your partner, who probably isn't even in there or if he is, it's for completely innocent reasons.

Even if it turns out that your partner has done something wrong, you have now done something much more wrong in the course of finding that out.

So don't look - it's that simple. You can trust me on this. ®

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