27 August 2020
A cuckold is a husband of an unfaithful wife. For most of its life, the word has been an insult, and it still can be, but in kink and fetish circles being a cuckold can be a positive thing.
Cuckold has cognates in many languages. The English word comes from Old French *cucuald. That term is unattested in early years, but the French word appears in 1463 as cucuault, so the older form is assumed to have existed. The French word comes from the Latin cuculus, meaning cuckoo, the bird, and the name is echoic of the bird’s call.
Cuckold arises from the fact that a cuckoo often lays its eggs in the nest of another bird, a metaphor for siring progeny in another man’s home, and in other languages, the word for a cuckold can apply to both the husband and the male adulterer, although in English it is applied only to the cheated-upon husband.
The earliest appearance of cuckold in English is in the Early Middle English debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale, composed c.1275. The poem survives in two manuscripts, London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.9 and Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part 2. In the relevant passage, the owl makes the point that women who are abused or cheated upon by their husbands often turn to other men, justifying their making their husbands cuckolds:
Nis nan mon þat ne mai ibringe
His wif amis mid swucche þinge.
Me hire mai so ofte misbeode,
Þat heo do wule hire ahene neode.
La, Godd hit wot! heo nah iweld,
Þah heo hine makie kukeweld.
(There is no man who cannot lead his wife astray with such behavior. One may abuse her so often, that she will satisfy her own needs. Oh, God only knows! She cannot resist it, though she makes him a cuckold.)
The noun becomes a verb in the sixteenth century. From William Warner’s Albions England. of 1589:
Nay, be it that he should espy false carding, what of it?
It shall be thought but ielosie in him, or want of wit.
Him frownese shall threat, or smiles intreat, and few will iudge, I winne,
If it shall come in question, that to Cockhole him were sinne.
You may have noticed that the use of cuckold is rather sexist. It only refers to men whose wives have been unfaithful, never the other way around. Given the sexual double-standard that has existed since antiquity, this should be no surprise. But there is a word for woman who has been cheated upon; it is cuckquean. It’s a compound of the first syllable of cuckold and a now-archaic spelling of queen. The Old English cwen not only could refer to a noble woman or wife of a king, it could refer to any woman or a wife. In Early Middle English, the vowel became more open when queen was used to simply mean a woman, as opposed to the closed vowel when used to refer to the wife of a king. The two pronunciations merged again in the Early Modern period, so we don’t hear the difference today, but the distinction was maintained by spelling the common-woman sense as quean. At this time, quean also developed a disparaging connotation of a sexually assertive woman or prostitute.
Cuckquean appears by the middle of sixteenth century. From John Heywood’s 1546 A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue:
Ye shewe all thunkyndnesse ye can deuyse.
And where reason and custome (they saie) afoords
Alwaie to let the loosers haue theyr woords,
You make hir a cookqueyn, and consume hir good.
Cuckquean had a run of about a century, but it faded from use by the mid seventeenth century. It popped up in James Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses used to describe the old woman who delivers the milk in the first episode:
A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning.
But otherwise cuckquean remained largely unused until the twenty-first century. It appears multiple times in the blog of journalist George Bullard. Bullard seems to have been fond of the term, applying it often to Hillary Clinton. Here’s the earliest of those uses from 12 May 2006:
Jeb Bush is again being chatted up as presidential material.
Florida, after all, is a go-go state and the governor can take some credit for same. And Hillary Clinton races toward the middle to give herself a shot on the Dem side.
Downsides include Jeb's brother, who currently has low approval ratings. And cuckquean Hillary also once had a problem with a certain relative.
It’s also been used by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage. Here’s an example from 26 December 2007 in response to a woman who wants to watch her boyfriend with another woman:
Accept that acting on your fantasies—your cuckquean fantasies (only men can be cuckolds)—involves risk for you, for your boyfriend, and for your thirds. Then set about minimizing 'em.
The reappearance of cuckquean coincides with the rise—or perhaps the coming out of the closet as no doubt it has been there all along—of the sexual fetish of cuckolding, that is deriving pleasure from watching, or just knowing about, and being debased by one’s partner’s dalliances with other people. In such cases it’s not really cheating.
But the occasional cuckquean aside, the kink of voluntary cuckolding is still largely restricted to men who like watching their female partners with other men. Undoubtedly the existence of the sexual double standard makes it more humiliating for men than for women, and the debasement is what excites. The fetish of cuckolding also frequently involves a White couple where the woman sleeps with a Black man, adding a racist element to the kink.
The kink also goes by another name, also sexist in that there is no equivalent male term, hotwifing.
The earliest reference that I have found to hotwife or hotwifing (usually, but not always, spelled as one word) is from a story on Literotica.com from 15 June 2001:
I've had fantasies about my wife fooling around on me long before I found out there were websites devoted to this kind of thing. Needless to say ever since I've been checking out hotwife sites I've gotten bolder and bolder with my bedtime suggestions.
There are undoubtedly older uses in kink and fetish circles.
A blog post from the website Velvet Reviews from 15 July 2010 gives a fuller explanation of the practice:
A Hot Wife is a woman who is free to have sex with others with her husband’s knowledge, approval and encouragement. The level of her husband’s involvement can vary. In fact it will be up to YOU. Some wives play completely on their own, with no interaction with her husband. Others enjoy their husband watching or participating. However, in all these relationships the wife is free to play with others, while the husband remains completely monogamous and faithful only to her.
And there is this, somewhat different, description of hotwifing that appeared in the Huffington Post UK on 24 December 2017:
Yet here was a couple, and the many couples I have since worked with, who were consensually and deliberately inviting another man into their bed -- to have sex with the wife! They were not in my therapy room because of coercion, or cheating pain. No, they were there because they wanted better strategies to manage cuckolding and what today is called "hotwifing".
"Hotwifing," literally means "hot wife sharing", It is a fetish in which a husband/partner is turned on by watching his hot wife/partner have sex with another man that he has chosen. He chooses a "bull"––a man who is well endowed, preferably better endowed than he is.
Then he becomes the director of the production that he sets up. This production is a result of his sexual erotic orientation. He wants to be cuckolded. He seeks to feel simultaneously deeply humiliated and deeply aroused sexually. He wants to feel like a victim of the man he has invited in, and whom he orchestrates to make love to his woman.
At about this time, the word worms its way into politics with the appearance of the term cuckservative and its clipped form cuck. The abbreviation cuck for cuckold has been around for a while, but it has never been very common. Here’s an example from Edward Ward’s 1715 Hudibras redivivus:
This Cavalcade b’ing gone and past,
All scampering out of Town in haste,
The sinful Troops soon disappear’d,
And left the Streets of London clear’d,
Where Shops and Stalls were all shut in,
And Passengers appear’d so thin,
As some Pestilential Curse,
Not the Horn-Plague, but something worse,
Had drove the frighted Cucks from thence,
To shun the fatal Consequence.
(The OED gives a date of 1706, but I can’t find the word in that earlier edition of the work.)
I have found an isolated use of cuckservative and the verb to cuck from 1 April 2010 by @glopdemon on Twitter, but it is difficult to tell exactly what is meant by the term:
A liberal is just a conservative that hasn't been cucked yet. Looking for paleo-con man missile to do this. #cuckservative #tcot #tcuck
And there is this anonymous posting which appeared on a 4chan message board on 26 September 2014. From the diction, it appears to have been written by a Briton, and cuckservative here is an epithet for the Conservative Party as opposed to an extreme member of it:
Being a member of the cuckservative party
Being from the most irrelevant country in the union
Getting bullied by pakis in subway
But use of cuckservative and cuck would explode in an American context on Twitter in July 2015, with the beginnings of the presidential campaign and the rise of Donald Trump as a candidate. A blog post by David Weigel on 29 July 2015 quotes Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer defining the term:
Who are the "cuckservatives?"
You might be one! The hashtag's targets are conservatives who seem to have made peace with elements alien to traditional white Americanism. That could mean the transgender movement; it could mean non-white immigrants. Certainly, criticizing Trump's visit to the border, saying he will alienate certain voters, is a trial run for cuckservative status.
"Just look at them!" said Spencer. "Glenn Beck, Erik [sic] Erickson, Mike Huckabee. They're mediocrities, or sub-mediocrities. They're grinning, obese doofuses. No person with a deep soul—no person who wants to take part in a moment that's idealistic, that's going to change the world—would want to be a part of 'conservatism.' In a way, the current 'cucks' are the residue of the Bush era. They were the 'conservative' and 'Religious Right' allies of the neoconservatives. They're still around, for no apparent reason."
Basically, a cuckservative or cuck is a conservative, or really anyone, who is not a white supremacist Neo-Nazi. And much like the sexual fetishist who revels in being humiliated, those politicians who are called cucks should wear the epithet with pride.
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