Today in Ashley Madison: the Toronto-based infidelity-enabling dating service has teamed up with recording artist and notorious domestic-assault felon Chris Brown for a music video about cheating. Great.
“AshleyMadison.com Featured in Chris Brown’s Newest Ode to Infidelity,” screamed a press release issued today by Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media, whose executives apparently don’t care about anything.
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The video for “Loyal” (embedded above) features Brown in a normcore bucket hat rapping about how women (referred to, uncharitably, as “hos”) aren’t trustworthy, which must be a big problem for Chris Brown, who seems like a great guy, practically an actual saint. The video has multiple insert shots of women flicking through the Ashley Madison site on their smartphones, brazen and unfeeling about their pursuit of infidelity, and the the fact that it might hurt Chris Brown’s feelings, the poor man.
“Music and infidelity have long been tied together,” says Ashley Madison CEO and Founder Noel Biderman in the press release. “For decades, artists have sung about people’s cheating ways, and songs have the power to make people think about their own relationship. AshleyMadison.com’s partnership with Chris Brown is telling of how common infidelity is, and that younger generations are more accepting of it.”
Biderman doesn’t address the fact that the song actually seems to be anti-infidelity. It’s sort of like the NRA sponsoring a video where a whole bunch of people get shot. But when you’re a company whose bottom line is built on baser impulses and broken families, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
As the ol’ hip-hop truism goes: “Don’t hate the player, hate the dating network that callously profits off the player, making millions off the back of his infidelities.”
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