WATCH ABOVE: The high number of Torontonian Ashley Madison users has left many people wondering why we are so frisky and what’s behind it. Marianne Dimain reports.
TORONTO — Despite the squeaky clean image of Canadians as polite and proper, data released by hackers potentially reveals a much friskier side.
Turns out, thousands of Canadian email addresses are registered to adultery website Ashley Madison.
“We have about 273 thousand people with Canadian “.ca” registered domain names,” said Globalnews.ca Investigative reporter Patrick Cain. “People registering for Ashley Madison didn’t have to verify their email addresses so whether those addresses are real addresses we don’t know.”
READ MORE: In Canada, U.K. and U.S., Ashley Madison users were over 80% male
Among the estimated 32-million registered users to the site, stats have also reportedly revealed that Toronto has the highest number of users in Canada. That makes it the fourth highest city in the world.
Psychologist Dr. Oren Amitay says the reason is simple.
“Anytime you have a metropolitan city you have more liberal attitudes,” said Amitay. “The bigger the city is the more opportunities you have to pull off covert affairs. That’s why you have Toronto and other big cities having such large users.”
But it may go even further than that. According to some experts, humans are not meant to be monogamous. It’s a trait that dates back to our evolutionary past.
“Humans are not by definition monogamous,”said Brian Boutwell, Associate Professor Criminology, Saint Louis University. “It’s far more typical that we’ll at least date multiple partners people in the life course prior to getting married.”
So what does that mean for monogamy? Ask a happily married couple and they may tell you it exists. But a look back at the history of marriage and there’s no black and white answer.
“The first forms of marriage were polygamous, if people could afford it. Eventually monogamy became the ideal and also the legal standard,” said Elizabeth Abbott, research associate at Trinity College. “But its certainly been practiced in the breach throughout history.”
READ MORE: Bank statements, browser history ‘most embarrassing’ info to leak online: survey
Meanwhile fallout continues over the Canadian email addresses which are linked to government officials, the RCMP and major businesses. It’s not known if all of the accounts are legitimate.
Psychologist Oren Amitay says if there’s any silver lining, it’s this;
“Even though we may be biologically driven to cheat, we have these huge frontal lobes that allow us to have judgement to make a conscious decision not to do so,” he said.
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