“Cuck,” short for “cuckold,” has become the insult of choice in this surreal political season, at least amongst alt-rightists and anime Nazis and other elements of Donald Trump’s political army.
The insult, inspired by a specialized porn genre in which white “hotwives” have sex with black men while their white “cuckold” husbands watch, is intended to suggest not just emasculation but also a kind of racial treason. Or at least that’s what the insult originally meant; at this point it gets thrown at anyone and everyone who stands in the way of the Trump revolution — including women, who by definition can’t be “cucked.”
The people who are most fond of this insult seem to think it has some sort of magical power. In a recent post on the alt-right site The Right Stuff, a guy who calls himself Auschwitz Soccer Ref declares that, in the word “cuck,” he and his comrades had found a sort of right-wing version of “racist,” which he describes as “a powerful, weaponized term” that leftists use to take down, well, racists like him.
The word “cuck” is an “absolutely devastating” insult, he explains.
“Cuck” works for the same reason that “racist” works: it is an irrational word that cannot be deconstructed with reasoning. Just as “racist” hits rightists hard because it attempts to psychopathologize the healthy preference for our own race, “cuck” is devastating to leftists because they are being described as the most humiliating kind of man possible, one who gets aroused by letting another man—or other men—have sex with his wife.
There’s only one problem with Mr. Soccer Ref’s theory: “cuck” isn’t “devastating to leftists,” or indeed to any white dude who isn’t pathologically preoccupied with the specter of black (or Muslim, or Mexican) men having sex with “our” white women. In other words, “cuck” only really stings as an insult to the very people who are tossing the insult around.
And insofar as the related term “cuckservative” actually bothers conservatives, I suspect they are less bothered by the sexual and racial overtones of the term than they are by the implication that they are not bona fide conservatives.
[J]ust like “racism” transcends political terminology like “fascist” and brings morality into the discussion, “cuck” transcends political terminology like “traitor” and brings sexuality and gender into the discussion, thus widening its implications. For years this kind of transcendent, weaponized term was missing from the right’s lexicon, but now it’s here, and that’s why “cuck” is so hurtful to the left and kosher conservatives.
Nope. One of the reasons that “racist” has the bite that it does is because the insult is so often true. What’s strange is that the insult doesn’t just bother garden variety racists; is also bothers alt-rightists and others on the far right whose ideologies are actually rooted in racism. Most racists hate to be labelled as such; that’s why you find so many of them on the far right resorting to euphemism, describing themselves as “race realists” or proponents of “Human Biodiversity” rather than simply admitting that, yes, they are huge bigots.
At-rightists and Trump enthusiasts aren’t the only ones obsessed with cuckolding. Men’s Rights activists are as well, though their definition of “cuckolding” comes not from porn but from one of the term’s original meanings. MRAs worry endlessly about the prospect of their wives (real or hypothetical) cuckolding them by conning them into raising children fathered by another man, presumably some alpha male lover she has on the side.
Indeed, many MRAs and Evo Psych professors have convinced themselves that this old-school variety of cuckolding is exceedingly common, with up to a third of the world’s ostensible fathers unknowingly raising kids who are not theirs.
But a new study published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution suggests that this is nonsense. Using genetic testing and genealogical research, the authors of the study found that the real rate of such cuckoldry has “stayed near constant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years.”
Somehow I doubt that this study will lead MRAs to be any less paranoid about being cuckolded, much less convince the internet’s Anime Nazis to give up an insult they think is “absolutely devastating.”
H/T — Thanks to both readers who alerted me to the new cuckolding study.
Also also ace people. 🙂
Lea – Because nothing says I don’t care like rambling for five paragraphs…
Yep.
Like you said BRONY, only four lines.
Glenn – Because nothing says I don’t care like coming back several hours later.
@Kagato, if you’re still reading, I’m loving the synergy between the image you posted and your avatar. Beauty.
Glen: Cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck. *pecks the ground* Cu-cu-cu-ba-CUCK. *lays an egg*
Glenn,
I’m not mocking you for your benefit. The other readers and I enjoy a giggle at your expense whether you come back for more or not. I post purely for pleasure, not for your edification.
At least Glenn is illustrating this post’s premise.
Good job!
Thanks Lea! Likewise.
@Glenn
It’s good to know I made that mistake. My apologies.
You really know you have nothing to say when you jump right in with an argument about how many lines someone wrote.
I lost all respect for Mr. Friendly Atheist when he advanced the argument that Richard Dawkins is a poor dear who is misunderstood by other atheists who think he is wearing privilege blinders, and that Dawkins’ biggest crime is being clumsy with the Internet.
No surprise that someone who is OK with misogyny and racism when it comes from a prominent white man would be OK with misogyny and racism when it comes from someone else.
I was done with Hemet when he argued that forced birthers deserve space in the atheist community. He’s anti-feminist. Thats why the MRAs swarm to him.
Awww, seriously? That is so disappointing.
I’m very grateful to some of the people in this comment section, especially Lea and Kirbywarp, for opening my eyes with regards to Mehta about a year and a half ago. I used to really like him and that lingering fondness had made me blind to what he had drifted into becoming.
I’m disappointed in him. Even if one assumes good faith on his part and not complicity, he’s still trying to whitewash over deeply unacceptable behaviour on many people’s part. He may be doing so in order to keep the movement going, but I recall no frank and open conversation in which the toxicity problems were acknowledged and it was decided that the movement was worth keeping going.
I’m also disappointed in myself for not seeing it until it was pointed out to me.
My Significant Otter used to read Mehta a number of years back, and she also escaped that terrible place for obvious reasons. I was never a fan.
Ni! Ni! Ni!
http://wiki.godvillegame.com/images/4/4d/Ni_we_are.jpg
It’s not hurtful, except to the reputation of the one saying it. I have to wonder what sort of imaginary world these guys live in where ‘cuck’ is even a thing. Must be a scary place.
questions: “When analysands recount fantasies to their analyst, they are informing the analyst about the way in which they want to be related to objet a, in other words, the way in which they would like it be positioned with respect to the Other’s desire.” – from The Lacanian Subject, Bruce Fink 1995
In the internet universe, among the alt-Right specifically and most pervasively, the insult ‘cuck’ is the go-to, default insult—short for ‘cuckold’, or a man that derives enjoyment (though perhaps not avowedly) from watching his partner have sex with another (or even merely knowing that this is the case).
Two questions then.
First, what precisely is the configuration of the subject’s relation to the objet a at play here in the cuck’s fantasy? Second, what can we say of the fact that this word should have come to serve as a common insult lobbed by alt-Right folk at their political, typically leftie opponents? Relatedly, what is the psychodynamic of insult—i.e., what is the subject attempting to do and what is he in fact accomplishing in launching a particular insult at an other?
preliminary thoughts: so my thinking is something along these lines. picking up on something Foucault mentions in passing (if you know where, fill me in, because i remember it distinctly but can’t find the source), the nation is analogous to the body. the “grafting” of whiteness—a trait that inheres literally in physical bodies—onto an ideology of national identity in the alt-right suggests there’s something to the analogy. to run with it loosely, the increasing social recognition of the other—the black other, the Mexican other, etc—is experienced something like the penetration of the body. (here there’s a thought to be developed on the coincidence of the other as both racially other, race being a percieved genetic, blood trait, and the other as other-gendered, having other sexuality.) so, then, why ‘cuck’? first, a distinction between two uses of ‘cuck.’ the modern, fetish usage refers to a man who derives pleasure from being cuckolded, which is to say it depends on the man’s knowledge of it. the older use, however, does not require the man to know. he is being cuckolded even when his wife conducts an affair without his knowledge. it was also used to refer to a man raising another man’s son but ignorant of the fact the son is not his own. the alt-right person experiences himself as cucked in the second sense, e.g., the black other is fucking his America. however, the requirement of the second definition, namely, that the man is ignorant, is met not by the fact that he doesn’t know plain and simple. rather, the knowledge is there, but its disavowed and projected onto the leftie. in support of this, the fact that the insult ‘cuck’—at least in my three weeks of internet experience recently—is always directed at the white leftie, not at the black leftie, woman leftie, etc., i.e., at the left equivalent of the white male being cucked, and not at the group doing the cucking e.g. the woman, the other-raced man.
so that’s preliminary thoughts on the rise of that word. the interesting next step would be to ask whether the alt-right cuck’s accusation is right. as i said, he is a would-be cuck in the second sense, the ignorant cuck. but when he insults the leftie white male as a cuck, it means ‘cuck’ in the first sense. the leftie white male is percieved as complicit in it by his vocal support of what have you, feminism, BLM, and so on. so then, how do we assess this insult further? is it true? is the alt-righter perceiving something real? i think yes, he is percieving something real but he percieves it wrongly and misjudges the correct response.
to address what is being perceived then. consider the structure of a cuck relationship. it is precisely not a threesome in that the partner is not shared with the other. it relies on the other taking the body and the man being denied the body. in other words, it is a zero-sum game. now consider the line available to the leftie accused of being a cuck, and this line is a typical-enough response on the left in general: just because eg black people gain recognition, just because they gain economic prosperity, it isn’t at the same time suggested that whites will be worse off—the betterment of blacks’ position economically and socially doesn’t bring with it a slipping of whites’ positions. but insofar as you accept marx’s economics, capitalism is in fact a zero-sum game. it is the zero-sum nature that the alt-right person intuits at least, and that’s the grain of truth or the partial truth in his position. the grain of truth or partial truth in the left position—insofar as it is really a left position—is the perception of class conflict. the blinder in the alt-right position involves trasnposing this conflict onto the issue of race. the blinder in the mainstream left position involves buying into the capitalist story about “a bigger pie means we are all better off and no one is worse off.”
Good article except I have issue in the use of the word “racist”.
I can see where the word fascist fits into the equation of a bigot because it states someone who has won without merit to winning.
A racists beginnings comes from what it is, a race. A race that qualifies for a sport. There are many races in life. Some are physical and some are mental. But all are sports that require the equation of money.
The word racist was taken out of context by the bigots and fascists from the confederacy who can’t compete against the slave(like a cuckservative). Now the word racist does indeed transcend the word bigot or fascist because, since the confederacy, it can be used to attempt to align the jealousy of the loser who continues to be the bigot and fascist, by whining about the person that they can not compete with.
Also no doubt are the cuckfederates that would also enjoy the sight of watching his woman with a black man.
So I caution you on the use of racism unless you want to appear to be a cuckservative and whine because you can’t compete with someone so the use of the word racist will usually be the first attempt at labeling someone.
@John
That makes no sense whatsoever.
Quote the parts you think support what you are saying.
@John
(Image: a bowl of words with a red, white, and blue dinosaur on it, captioned : “Word salad :when you really have no fucking clue what you’re talking about)
“It is an irrational word that Cannot be deconstructed with reasoning.”
Challenge accepted.
We are bothered by the use of the word “cuck” not because it’s offensive or hits too close to home, but because it’s just a shitty insult. The connotation behind the word’s usage is that, like a man who feels emasculated by his wife’s infidelity, those who do not support the alt right regime are to be viewed as pathetic and inferior.
Except that’s not how that works. The word “cuckold” has such a specific definition that it cannot be used in any figurative sense. In order for such an insult to be true and effective, the following criteria must be met regarding the target of the insult:
1: he is male
2: he is straight
3: he is married
4: he has been cheated on before
5: he lives in constant fear of it happening again
6: he is white
7: his wife is also white
8: he shares the alt right’s paternalistic obsession with “race mixing”
Any insult that requires you to make that many assumptions about the other person is not an effective insult – not to mention that it’s just awkward to hear such a flowery, old-fashioned word being used as modern slang. It just hits the ear wrong.