Adultery Made Easy: An Interview With AshleyMadison.com

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Are you tired of using less-than-reputable means to find a sex partner outside of your marriage? If so, AshleyMadison.com is for you! Yep, there's a site on the ol' Net that caters to married adults looking for some good, wholesome, adulterous fun. With thousands of members in St. Louis and three million more worldwide, it's quite apparent that having an affair is the new black. Noel Biderman runs the site and, as you may imagine, he has his share of enemies. Hoping to make a few more and spread his message of marital infidelity to the St. Louis masses, Noel (NB) gave ToastedRav (TR) a few minutes of his time.

TR: You're condoning and handsomely profiting off of extramarital affairs. How do you defend something like that?
NB: Well, AshleyMadison didn't invent infidelity; It's been around since the institution of marriage. Our view is that we're streamlining an affair that's going to happen anyway. We're just saying don't have it in the workplace, don't have it on a singles dating service, come to our service where other people feel the same way as you and you're going to find something successful. If you're not getting the sexual fulfillment you need in your relationship, you're going to get it somewhere else, that's human nature, it's in your DNA. Our service just caters to the people who say "I'm not going to be unhappy anymore."

TR: How can members be sure they're not going to get caught?

NB: Members sign in anonymously. Photos are private and you only release them when you've created a level of comfort with the person you're speaking with. The whole nature of this service is about discretion. (The site) came out of the fact that people predisposed to seek an affair would do it at the workplace or by lying about their status on a singles dating site. Both of those are fraught with the chance of real exposure and that's how people get caught.

TR: Recent stats out of Stanford University say up to sixty five percent of married men and fifty percent of married women have affairs. You run a service many of those people use...so are those statistics troubling to you?

NB: I think marriage is an institution that's undergoing a metamorphosis. It was created a long time ago, when people lived a much shorter period of life. But now, people are getting divorced more often than they're staying married, so it's changing. I think one of those changes is that the bedroom isn't the end-all-be-all anymore. People tend to forgive a cheating spouse if the other elements, economics, friendship, and kids, are there.

TR: Are you married?
NB: Me? Yes.

TR: Have you ever been cheated on? I'm trying to find out how you'd feel if your wife used your site.
NB: Well, stats would say I have been cheated on, but I haven't that I know of. I'm hoping to be one of the lucky ones that can power through and create a relationship that has that fidelity attached to it. If my wife cheated on me, I'd be devastated. But I'd also be looking in the mirror to try to understand why. I wouldn't be blaming a website. I probably wouldn't even blame the person cheating on me. I'd blame myself because I'd really want to understand how I missed the signals.

TR: Of all the sites out there that offer a service like this, you're the most present. I've seen you on Ellen, The Tyra Banks Show, Howard Stern, on and on. Knowing you have people out there that, to put it lightly, boisterously disagree with what you do, why do the press?

NB: The PR is part of making this a successful thing. We let people know that they're not alone in feeling uncertain in their relationships and current life circumstances. They don't have to be shy about coming to use our services. We need to get past this whole Scarlet Letter notion that somehow people are wrong for doing this, that they should stay unfulfilled.

Want more? Click the Video tab to see the Ashley Madison commercial making all that noise as well as Noel's memorable appearance on The Tyra Banks Show.

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