Rise of the cuckolds

Ah, cuckoldry. A centuries old form of submissive play that involves three individuals: the cucked, the cuckoldress, and the bull. The cuckold gets off on seeing their partner, the cuckoldress, receive sexual satisfaction from a third party, the bull. The kinkiness comes in through the power exchange: the cuckold gets to be the person who is not adequate enough for their partner, and sends them off to a real casanova who is, presumably, better in the sack. The cuckold is typically the fount of this fantasy of inferiority, and having it played out in reality can be a real turn-on.

While many contemporary kinksters use the word cuck in a gender neutral way, outside of these consensual kink practices, the word “cuck” is thrown around to refer to a weak, emasculated, or impotent man. All rather toxic ways to view gender, sexuality, and masculinity, if you ask me.

I must have first heard the word cuck in 2015 or 2016. Publications like the LA Times and GQ were writing guides on the lexicon of the right, explaining words and acronyms like incel, SJW (social justice warrior), and snowflake. I have trouble remembering a world that hadn’t already digested these words, a culture before the poisonous lingo of a niche community of white supremacists had been fully metabolized by the mainstream. 

Whereas liberal men were called “soyboys” (a pejorative that originated from 4chan, meant to invoke femininity, wokeness, and softness as negative), MAGA henchmen originally liked to call traditional Republicans “cucks” when they did not fall in line with the MAGA ideology. Ten years on, “cuck” has evolved into a general insult for an emasculated man, migrating as a casual piece of slang and used even among liberals and lefties. I’ve heard Hasan Piker, one of the most infamous lefty commentators on the internet, lob it around to describe anyone from a lily-livered politician to an annoying character in a video game. I suspect the longevity is in part due to the way the word cuck has a beautiful, bludgeon-like quality that’s fun to hurl like other loveable cusswords (shit, bitch,—not to mention rhymes with—fuck). 

Becoming a cuck anthropologist

My love life has always tended toward the non-monogamous, free love, Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions type shit. Compersion, a word I learned on Tumblr at a young age, is now an essential building block to the way I approach all relationships. It describes the vicarious joy of someone else’s happiness or fun, which I’ve always understood, both in and out of a sexual context. I’ve always been happy to hear about the people I like going on adventures, winning awards, and—yes—having great sex.

The word cuck never resonated with me, personally. The idea that someone I was having sex with was having sex with someone else never brought about that exciting jealousy, no pleasurable cringe in my chest when my sexual partners talked about their sexual adventures that I was not involved in. 

Although I didn’t identify with the term, I wanted to understand the difference between cuckoldry and the compersion I could so easily get behind. I became a bit of a cuck anthropologist: I brought it up at parties, in group chats, I asked people on Instagram and DM’ed strangers about it. To my surprise, a lot of people were into the idea of cuckolding—both as a kink and as a pornographic category to view. 

The conversations I had in this amateur survey helped me to realize something that I had failed to: cuck-as-a-kink had a distinctly masochistic element. And while I didn’t understand concepts like marital ownership, jealousy, and the humiliation of role play cheating, masochism was something I had experience in. Being cucked seemed to begin in a place of pain. When someone’s made a cuckold of you, it’s because your partner or friend had to go to someone else to have fun. (At least, that appeared to be the root of the pleasure for many I spoke with—though the reasons for cuckolding can be multiplicitous.)

While many of us can participate in cuckoldry within the healthy and consensual foundations necessary for all responsible BDSM play, some report the kink being misused in practice—layered with unexamined biases and unethical undertones. 

I talked to my friend Ryan-Ashley Anderson, who formerly worked as a phone sex operator. She told me how she became inundated with clients seeking to play out cuckolding fantasies. What started as a niche fetish became ubiquitous by the time she quit in the mid to late 2010s. 90-100% of the calls were about a client’s (invented, inescapable, and/or biological) “inability” to please his wife or girlfriend. Not all kinks have to be deep and psychological, but it seemed to Anderson that many of these clients were playing out their unprocessed inner shame and desires via cuckolding fantasies, while others were participating in plain old misogyny. These men didn’t really seem to care about their partner’s happiness or sexual satisfaction. They wanted to be told they actually couldn’t please their wives, for the benefit of their own needs. Some would admit to Anderson to having repressed feelings of queerness, feelings of disgust around having sex with women, and sorrow about living a life of compulsory heterosexuality. They wanted proxy-sex, and requested scenes where they were being cucked by some hot man. They craved explicit details of their female partner’s pleasure with another man, so they could imagine themselves into a dormant queer fantasy—while not explicitly admitting to having one.

Other clients, Anderson recalled, had obvious un-interrogated colonial/racist bigotries that brought the cuckold fantasy to race-play, one in which a Black man played the “bull” in the dynamic, antagonized alongside a woman framed as an unfaithful whore of a wife—in a toxic, layered manifestation of racism and misogyny. This trope is common in pornography, as well. It's this version which perhaps brings cuckolding closest to its medieval misogynistic origins, and the 4channy, Steve Bannon-based obsession with white-male-victimhood which has now co-opted the word. 

In this context, cuck-as-an-insult aligns with the moral panic at the intersection of masculinity, patriarchy, and race. As I continued my research, it seemed to me that using cuck as an insult may reify the more unsavoury aspects of the word.

Are we all cucks, kind of?

In a GQ article from 2016, Dana Schwarz wrote, “‘Cuck’ is a concept borne out of insecurity: a fear that one is inadequate, sexually or otherwise, and that inadequacy will lead to the loss of the things that are important...” 

With all of this in mind, I began to understand that the memetic quality of this fetish, this word, may be a symptom of something larger. Many of us, struggling to get by in a hyper-capitalist culture, live dissociative lifestyles—performing cheap, uninteresting labor, staring at screens, and generally living a partitioned life. To face the reality of needing to keep a shitty job to keep your shitty apartment and make sure you eat enough shitty food, is maddening. It’s impossible to get through this kind of life without a little dissociation. The years we’ve all spent staring at screens, living through a pandemic that forced us into cubby holes for survival, seeking connection through windows and web cameras, have perhaps trained us to normalize a life divorced from what our body craves and needs. Maybe it’s why so many of us are into being cucked. We’re used to deriving pleasure from watching someone else have a good time, rather than participating in the action ourselves.

Perhaps the rise of the cuck has to do with a collective divorce from the body. The data suggests that this dissociative lifestyle I’m describing is one we’ve all become accustomed to. In his 2018 book, Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire, Dr. Justin J. Lehmiller found that of the 4,000 Americans surveyed, 58 percent of men and over one third of women reported having cuckold fantasies. In 2025, PornHub reported that search queries for “cuckold” that year were up by 73 percent. 

But perhaps this collective adoption of the cuckolding fetish can be a kind of balm, too. Now that the word has largely gone mainstream, losing its original context of misogynist medieval poetry as well as its secondary context rooted in incel culture, I wondered if maybe we can find a way to play with it, stigma-free. The act of being cucked can go deeper than the shallow play it often describes. It speaks to the masochistic joy of naming your own dissatisfaction and abjection, your own inability to live up to a higher standard. There can be something therapeutic about experiencing this. It’s a process that may help materialize that pervasive feeling that society largely devalues you and your human life, and one which can potentially transform it into something more personally productive. 

To be cuckolded is to identify those feelings of worthlessness and rub up against them, grind on it to grind it up and—in some cases—turn it into something else entirely. It can take the dissociative digital life and bring it into the world of the flesh, in all its erotic, sweaty, shameful glory. Instead of watching these sexual fantasies play out in porn on screens, to participate in them IRL is to actively try to transmute the shame one carries around into joy. My initial ignorance around cuckoldry cultivated my distaste for it, but through this journey of inquiry I’ve seen the potential for sexiness and healing at the core of the dynamic. Cuckolding can be a transformative act, rather than a completely dissociative one, even as it may speak to a collective dissatisfaction. Through active participation, the role of the watcher can become eroticized, an audience member that is playing a role in the scene. Perhaps one of the crucial first steps we can take toward a reunification of the mind and body, toward a reclamation of our forsaken erotic energy, is to simply sit forward, and really, truly, enjoy the show.

Bibliography:

Analysis: ‘Cuck,’ ‘snowflake,’ ‘masculinist’: A guide to the language of the ‘alt-right’, Jessica Roy, LA Times, October 2016. Accessed February 1, 2026 via Internet Archive 

Why Angry White Men Love Calling People “Cucks”, GQ, Dana Schwartz. August 1, 2016 

Cuck: The Weird History of a Disgusting Word You’re Going to be Hearing a Lot More. Paul B. Sturtevant. November 17, 2016

The Incel to ICE Pipeline (with F.D Signifier and Caroline Kwan). Matthew Bernstein, A Bit Fruity Podcast. February 8, 2026

The Dissociation Machine: The internet as trauma response. P.E. Moskowitz. September 13, 2023