There's a lone genius—possibly evil and certainly entrepreneurial—behind Ashley Madison. His name is Noel Biderman, and he's the chief executive officer of Avid Life Media, based in Toronto. "Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment," he declares. It's unclear if Biderman actually believes this—he's married and has two young kids—but like Hugh Hefner before him the business he has created pretty much requires that he say it. Behind his desk, in an office so lacking in embellishment it almost looks like a hastily assembled low-budget film set, is a large flat-screen monitor promoting his company's flagship brand. It reads: "Life is short. Have an affair." [...]
Biderman is quick to explain why his business isn't hurting anyone. "You eradicate Ashley Madison, you're not going to eradicate infidelity. That's what allows me to sleep at night," he says. "If you think that all affairs happen on Ashley Madison, you're very naive. The majority happen in the workplace. People are thrust together, that's where they happen." In that context, Biderman likes to argue, affairs can be much more damaging, by causing meltdowns at work, becoming public, and blowing up marriages. Ashley Madison and its clandestine, more transactional approach, he says, is actually a marriage saver, a public service of a kind. "Do you think if you stop allowing divorce attorneys to advertise, we would stop people from getting divorced?" he says. [...]
Biderman [...] makes the case that no marriage is defined entirely by sex. "I have two children, I have a wonderful extended family, I have deep economic ties," he says. "If I woke up and found my partner wasn't interested in being with me sexually and I tried to do everything I could but sex was now off her radar...Well, sex is important in my marriage—it is—but it's not No. 1 and it's not No. 2. So I would stray before I would just leave, because maybe that would give me enough of what I need to stay within my marriage to do all the other things that are critical to me."
When I asked Biderman's wife, Amanda, what it's like being joined in holy matrimony with an anti-marriage entrepreneur, she let out a long sigh. "Really, the business itself doesn't match who he is as a person—it's not our lifestyle or value system or any of that," she said. "I mean, yeah, I'd love it if he were working on a cure for cancer. But it's a business, and that's how we look at it."
~"Cheating Incorporated," by Sheelah Kohlhatkar (Bloomberg Businesweek)
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