14AR19-45

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Apologia Report 19:45 (1,228)

December 26, 2014

Subject: The technological assault on marriage

In this issue:

MARRIAGE - under a growing new attack in the 21st century

TRUTH - "a sophisticated, densely referenced, scholarly take on the perennial traits of human deceit and dishonesty"

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MARRIAGE

"The Adultery Arms Race" by Michelle Cottle -- "Technology has made cheating on your spouse, or catching a cheater, easier than ever. How digital tools are aiding the unfaithful and the untrusting - and may be mending some broken marriages. ...

"[S]oftware developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs." Cottle gives the example of how a man named Justin justifies his lifestyle: "Oh, sure, he enjoys the social and domestic comforts of a relationship.... He understands the suffering that infidelity can cause ('I have been cheated on so I know how much it hurts'). He even feels guilty about playing around. But for him, the adrenaline kick is irresistible. 'Not to mention,' he adds, 'no woman is the same [and] there is always going to be someone out there who can do something sexually that you have never tried.' Then, of course, there's 'the thrill of never knowing if you are going to get caught.'

"All of which makes it more than a little troubling that, while laboring to keep one semiserious girlfriend after another in the dark with privacy-enhancing apps, Justin has been equally aggressive about using spy apps to keep a virtual eye on said girlfriends. ... "'The monitoring is really just for my peace of mind,' he says. Plus, if he catches a girlfriend straying, 'it kind of balances it out and makes it fair.' That way, he explains, if she ever busts him, 'I have proof she was cheating so therefore she would have no reason to be mad.' ... Justin knows that many folks may find his playing both sides of the cheating-apps divide 'twisted.' But, he reasons, 'I am doing it for my safety to make sure I don't get hurt. So doesn't that make it right??' ...

"[R]eputable research puts the proportion of unfaithful spouses at about 15 percent of women and 20 percent of men - with the gender gap closing fast." Cottle refers to "a growing body of research on the devastation wrought by the proliferation of online-only betrayal. Researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. 'Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons,' says Katherine Hertlein, who studies the impact of technology on relationships as the director of the Marriage and Therapy Program at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas <mft.unlv.edu>. 'The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else.' ...

"[I]n a recent survey conducted in the United Kingdom, 62 percent of men in relationships admitted to poking around in a current or ex-partner's mobile phone. (Interestingly, among women, the proportion was only 34 percent. ... [A]ccording to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project <pewinternet.org>, 14 percent of adults have taken steps to hide their online activity from a family member or romantic partner. [L]awyers are starting to recommend digital-privacy clauses for prenup and postnup agreements. ...

"The company mSpy offers one of the top-rated programs for monitoring smartphones and computers; 2 million subscribers pay between $20 and $70 a month for the ability to do everything from review browsing history to listen in on phone calls to track a device's whereabouts. ... 10 to 15 percent are small businesses monitoring employees' use of company devices (another growing trend). ...

"Ashley Madison, the online-dating giant for married people (company slogan: 'Life is short. Have an affair.'), has a mobile app that provides some 30 million members 'on the go' access to its services. Last year, the company introduced an add-on app called BlackBook, which allows users to purchase disposable phone numbers with which to conduct their illicit business. ...

"[P]ost-affair surveillance seems to be an increasingly popular counseling prescription. Even as marriage and family therapists take a dim view of unprovoked snooping, once the scent of infidelity is in the air, many become enthusiastically pro-snooping—initially to help uncover the truth about a partner's behavior but then to help couples reconcile by reestablishing accountability and trust. The psychotherapist and syndicated columnist Barton Goldsmith <bartongoldsmith.com> says he often advocates virtual monitoring in the aftermath of an affair. Even if a spouse never exercises the option of checking up, having it makes him or her feel more secure. 'It's like a digital leash.'"

One adultery perp named Frank "grumbles about how 'the ease and the accessibility and the anonymity of the Internet' made it 'entirely too easy' for him to feed his addiction. ...

"For someone looking to stray, 'absolutely nothing is going to stop it,' says Frank, emphatically. 'Nothing.'" Atlantic, Nov '14, pp58-62. <www.ow.ly/GdXxi>

A recent cover story from Forbes, "Sex, Lies and iPhones" by Steven Bertoni (Nov '14, pp112-122), also emphasizes the magnitude of the online-dating trend. The feature profiles the creators of "Tinder, an app that over the past two years has completely reinvented how young people date and mate." How significant is Tinder? It "has logged 600% growth over the past 12 months, [and] has been downloaded 40 million times since it launched in 2012. The 30 million people who have registered collectively check out 1.2 billion prospective partners daily - that's 14,000 per second. And they're not just kicking the tires: Tinder is now facilitating almost 14 million romantic matches every 24 hours." Plus, "sources put Tinder's monthly active users near 18 million (about half its registered base) and daily users around 9 million."

At the bottom of it all is appearance-based attraction. Same old approach: new convenience. "Tinder's brilliance is digitizing how humans physically court and making it stunningly simple to do so via a smartphone: Link to your Facebook account with one tap and in seconds the app's algorithm is feeding you endless photos of potential mates in your area. No questionnaires or forms - just faces. Swipe right if you like the person, swipe left if you don't. When a person who you like separately likes you, Tinder connects you both via chatbox. 'We've eliminated the fear of rejection,'" says Sean Rad, a cofounder of the company.

The growth started as Rad "e-mailed a beta version to 600 of his most popular contacts in the L.A. party scene, stocking the online pool with young, attractive users." This was followed by "introducing Tinder one by one at elite schools - elite party schools. ... Tinder leapt from college scene to mainstream this past winter after [fellow cofounder Justin] Mateen pushed Tinder into the most exclusive singles party of all - the athlete village at the Sochi Winter Olympics. Tinder-fueled Olympic hookups became international news." <www.ow.ly/Ge574>

One last brief statistic. The Information Is Beautiful site of London-based author David McCandles, who has "written for The Guardian, Wired and others," includes an infographic which contrasts the extreme political Left and Right of America. A secondary heading rates the extent to which each extreme gives its "Support" in different areas. Beneath is a list of topics, the last of which is "unmarried sex." It is the only apparent area of agreement ... to the tune of 80 percent of the Right and 90 percent of the Left viewing the practice favorably. <www.ow.ly/Ge6DR>

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TRUTH

The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment, by Dallas G. Denery, II [1] -- "An intellectual discourse on the essence and history of duplicity. In an attempt to answer the question 'Is it ever acceptable to lie?' Denery (History/Bowdoin College) delivers a predominantly referential tome on how ancient history viewed deception and why the behavioral evolution of dishonesty, from the Medieval period and Middle Ages to the early modern world, continues to influence society at large. He does so through a multipart narrative offering five differing perspectives on how lying has altered historical events, beginning with an astute analysis of varying theological conceptions of mendacity. The author juxtaposes God and the devil, with each entity exhibiting its own form of both obvious and cleverly cloaked deception. Denery also examines the schematics of the Garden of Eden and ideological debates of theologian philosophers such as Augustine, Calvin and Descartes to create a rich tapestry of creative thought, attitude and presumption. He interprets these theories with an expert hand while exploring how mistruths upended the secular law of the Middle Ages, and he scrutinizes the controversial crossroads of masculine and feminine deceptive traits. Not necessarily for casual readers, Denery's classroom-ready textbook is often stiffly academic in tone and delivery. The author smartly skirts the tinderbox subject matter of dishonesty within the political arena (which could endure ad infinitum) and concludes with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's take on how lies are simply 'problems with natural causes and, hopefully, natural solutions.' Collectively, Denery's chapters authoritatively chronicle deception's gradual evolution from a hellish side effect of satanic belief to perhaps the pivotal axis upon which the contemporary world turns, ultimately (and somewhat startlingly) rationalizing that '[w]hile lies might occasionally threaten civil society, they also make it possible.' A sophisticated, densely referenced, scholarly take on the perennial traits of human deceit and dishonesty." Kirkus, Nov '14 #2.

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment, by Dallas G. Denery (Princeton Univ Prs, January 2015, hardcover, 352 pages) <www.ow.ly/Ge8Nw>

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