Ann's Status Symbols

The following status symbol is a website designed to connect individuals who want to have affairs:

http://www.ashleymadison.com/

This website was the single most shocking and influential status symbol I encountered all semester. I can’t believe there’s actually a dating service for strictly married people! To me this seems to be a huge failing of our society’s moral standards. If one were to look at just this website, one would think that any sense of commitment in our culture is completely a thing of the past.

This next article was originally published in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/fashion/29FamilyMatters.html

This article claims that Americans are now more likely to live vicariously through “divorce porn,” such as the book and movie, Eat, Pray, Love, than they are to actually get divorced. While I think that this might be an emerging phenomenon, I certainly don’t think that it’s true for the majority of Americans. The divorce rate is still incredibly high.