Infidelity.com - The market for affection and reiterations of familism in betrayal websites

"Life is short, soenjoy a fling". This is the slogan of one of the three websites about extramarital affairs that currently operates in Brazil promising discretion and fun provided by a "controlled" and "safe" practice of marital infidelity. Until August 2011, together, the three websites accounted for 370 thousand users in the country with growth expectations given the massive investment in the marketing and dissemination of their services.Although the "secret betrayal" is the motto used to persuade people to become users, we believe that the main appeal of this service is indeedhidden, i.e., it is anundeclared proposal: to keep familist values, that is to say, to protect the monogamous, and based on our research, heterosexual marriage by offering occasional affairs to customers, which, theoretically, would not interfere in astablerelationship. Infidelity as a sign of a failed relationship seems to be resignified in this online context given the number of men and women who identify themselves as being satisfied with their marriage.Accordingly, "betrayal" would not necessarily mean infidelity, but rather a way to "spice up" the marriage. Analyzing the slogans of the websites, we think that through them infidelity is sold as an adventure that can provide entertainment and pleasure without questioning the monogamous marriage as a model to be followed. In our incipient research, we have been using onlineethnography in order to understand the dynamic interactions of these platforms, in which romance and market seem to be associated reiterating bourgeois conventions.These issues refer to the meaning of romantic love, marriage, fidelity, and betrayal in those environments considering,in addition to gender bias, social class and generation divisions.Hence, we use the contributions of anthropology of the emotions, gender studies, and sexuality, as well as contributions of symbolic interactionism and social psychology.