Why is /r/adultery predominantly filled with women on a male-dominated sub? Are more women cheating on their spouses than men, and are just less likely to admit to it on surveys?

*male-dominated website

Not a lot of guilt from those unfaithful women. Most of their posts revolve around the hurt they feel when they break up with their APs. It’s kind of chilling that there’s no understanding that what they’re doing is wrong. Reminds me of this:

These questions first occurred to me a few years ago when I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands. From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. Like me, they were doing the family thing. They had cute kids, mortgages, busy social lives, matching sets of dishes. On the surface, their husbands were reasonable, the marriages modern and equitable. If these women friends were angry unfulfilled or resentful, they didn’t show it.

Then one day, one of them confided in me she’d been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years. Almost before I’d finished processing this, another friend told me she was 100 percent faithful to her husband, except when she was out of town for work each month. Not long after, another told me that while she’d never had sex with another man, she’d had so many emotional affairs and inappropriate email correspondences over the years that she’d had to buy a separate hard drive to store them all.

What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. There was deception but little secrecy or shame.

https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/why-women-cheat-esther-perel-state-of-affairs.html

It’s the same thing you deal with on r_adultery. When men cheat, there’s a basic understanding that what you’re doing is wrong. The fact that r_adultery is majority women on a male-dominated website is because women’s need for social conformity, and they need to know that what they’re doing is what so many others are doing. Once that’s established, there’s no self-reflecting or even questioning whether or not what one’s doing is wrong.

Male adulterers don’t engage in this self-delusion. They realize that they’re lying, breaking that fundamental expectation of exclusivity, and they bear it. Adulteresses come up with a myriad of ego-preserving self justifications, not unlike how they do so when discounting certain encounters when summing up their n.

The reason why the vast majority of thinkers in history are men is because we are so much more capable of challenging the herd and of breaking the mold.

Women used to police each other’s behaviors regarding promiscuity and infidelity because that was the status quo. Now that infidelity is increasingly becoming the status quo, they look to each other for justification and need their fellow travelers. Morality isn’t based on any sort of conclusions that are personally drawn but rather whatever the rest of the flock believes.