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Mischief Making
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Apparently, lust is alive and well. Whether it is an out-of-hours encounter at the office or a romantic rendezvous at the rugby club, the figures speak for themselves.
Nearly half of marriages are ending in divorce with 27% of those failures attributed to infidelity. And, if statistics from various sources are to be relied upon, somewhere between one in three and one in six married people have cheated on their partners.
It's a sad state of affairs, and I make no apology for the pun, but what would happen if we were offered a way of salving our consciences by, quite literally, paying for the sins of the flesh. Let's assume you have had an affair, wouldn't it be great if your wrongdoing could be nullified by a small financial penalty? Surely that would be a very simple way to deal with the reality of infidelity and avoid further messy repercussions: divorce, domestic upheaval and perhaps years of therapy.
Well, that's the philosophy behind Cheatneutral.com, a web site set up to help society to navigate its way to happiness and contentment despite the apparent web of deceit that exists amongst us.
If you have cheated on your partner, you can now purge yourself of guilt and avoid retribution by going along to this web site to 'offset' your indiscretion. You pay the sum of £2.50 and the money is passed on to a loyal couple to fund their continued fidelity. And, what's more, after receiving advice on how to reduce your level of cheating, you can invest in future unavoidable cheating by handing over a little more money to the old faithfuls.
Apparently, according to the site's figures, the truth may be worse than we fear; there are over 65,768 cheats and only 9,002 loyalty-card holders registered to the site. It's not clear what the gender gap is, but there are a handful of case studies to explain how both men and women have benefited from neutralizing their misdemeanours.
Alex, apparently, cheated on his partner at the office Christmas party. Instead of facing the turmoil of a bitter separation and a guilty conscience, he simply visited the Cheatneutral.com. He paid his £2.50 and, in exchange, received a certificate to prove that his behaviour had been neutralised. He could therefore no longer be held accountable for his actions. Apparently, Alex married his girlfriend later that year and continues to cheat knowing he can always top up his Cheatneutral account to compensate for his lack of loyalty.
Now, if you're a cheater, you've probably already dashed off to this site in an attempt to counter the emotional devastation you've caused. If you're not, you're probably reading this in complete disbelief and wondering how on earth the world got into such a sorry state of affairs. How can anyone pay for their lack of honesty, loyalty and integrity with a measly £2.50? Or any amount of money for that matter? Is it really possible to offset a cheating heart?
The answer, of course, is no. This site is joke, one that has been set up to make a point about the issue of climate change and carbon offsetting. And, whatever your feelings on the subject, this is an amusing, and relatively simple, way of explaining how it works. The site makes the point that it doesn't really do much to reduce the amount of cheating in the world in the same way as carbon offsetting does very little to reduce global carbon emissions. It's a viewpoint I have seen promoted on many, many web sites but never in quite such a witty way.
I should point out that visitors are reassured that cheating is not endorsed by the site. Neither is carbon offsetting.
Having looked into the principles behind the site's funny facade, I decided to check out a few facts and figures related to carbon offsetting and emissions trading. And that is surely the best reaction this web site could hope for. It's not really a question of what your opinion is on the issue of climate change and global warming; it's about forming one. We can only do that if we understand the concept and, if we don't, we need to be motivated to find out enough to make a judgment on the issue. Some people are happy to trawl through hundreds of pages of technical writing in order to gain an insight but others are not. When a message is aimed at the latter, a little lateral thinking can result in non-committals investigating the subject and joining in the debate.
Cheatneutral.com is one way of achieving just that. But, if you're still not interested in carbon offsetting, just go along for the gag. It's really quite funny - unless you have a guilty conscience of course.
