The latest advertising campaign – evoking the temptations of Eve with a partly eaten apple – for a dating website geared to married women looking for affairs, has spawned a backlash and a national debate in France.
The ads for the dating website Gleeden, which bills itself as “the premier site for extramarital affairs designed by women,” were recently splashed on the backs of buses in several French cities. Seven cities decided to withdraw the ads, and opponents have mobilized against them on social media, providing the latest example of a prominent cultural divide in France about the lines between public morality, private sexual conduct and the country’s vaunted freedom of expression.
Last month, the Catholic Family Associations filed a legal complaint against the site’s American publisher, Black Divine, in a Paris superior court. The Catholic group said the ad was crude and immoral and a reckless breach of an article in the civil code.
“I was shocked and disgusted when I saw the ad,” said Aude Ducros, a spokeswoman for the Catholic Family Associations. “Infidelity pollutes the couple and the family and destroys the social fabric of France. It is immoral to be publicly promoting adultery, and hurtful to infidelity’s victims.”
In conservative Versailles, the bus company Keolis said it withdrew the ad last month after receiving 500 complaints in a week. Normally, the company said, it might receive 900 such complaints over the course of a year.
In picturesque Rambouillet, the conservative mayor asked a bus company to remove the ad on the grounds that it breached the civil code and threatened the sanctity of marriage.
An anti-Gleeden petition circulated on social media garnered more than 20,000 signatures, while a #stopgleeden hashtag proliferated on Twitter.
“Fidelity is not for sale!” wrote a man who called himself Tangodeo, who posted a photograph of one of Gleeden’s defaced subway ads.
Gleeden, launched in 2009, has 1 million subscribers in France, and 2.4 million globally, who can anonymously trawl profiles for lovers.
Solene Paillet, a Gleeden spokeswoman, denounced censorship, arguing that the lawsuit against the site was bogus since adultery in France was decriminalized in 1975.
Moreover, she said the website, run by women for women, was a form of justice since Frenchwomen had suffered the indignity of cheating men for centuries while historically bearing the brunt of punishments for infidelity, including being shipped off to convents or prison.
“We want to give women a means to cheat on their husbands and to be sexually independent,” Paillet said.
