Millennials, Infidelity, and Porn

By Alysse ElHage - Posted at Family Studies:

In July, Ashley Madison—the infamous cheating website whose 37 million clients were exposed by a hacker last year—launched a new ad campaign aimed at rebranding the commercialization of infidelity. According to The Atlantic, the changes include a new tagline—from the in-your-face, “life is short, have an affair,” to the perhaps more subtle, “Find your moment.” The company’s president explained the rebrand as an effort to “evolve, grow and attune to modern sexuality in 2016.”

While Ashley Madison’s creators might be trying to revamp the public image of cheating-for-hire, the vast majority of American adults still disapprove of cheating on a spouse. But that might be changing among younger generations, according to new research from Paul Hemez at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University.

Hemez used data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to examine adult attitudes about marital infidelity, including changes in attitudes since 1973, as well as by age, gender, education, marital status, and race in 2014. He found that since the early 1970s, American adults have generally become more disapproving of infidelity—with disapproval increasing by 20 percent between 1973 to 2008 when 84 percent agreed that it’s “always wrong” for a married person to have sexual relations with someone other than their spouse. However, in 2014, the proportion of Americans who agreed that extramarital sexual relations are “always wrong” declined to 79 percent (see Figure 1).

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