Cuckold
The cuckold is the partner in a cuckolding dynamic who watches, hears about, or is otherwise made aware of their partner having sex with someone else, and finds erotic charge in that position. The role is defined by a particular relationship to displacement: the cuckold is the one who is sidelined, compared, or found wanting, and the arousal comes from occupying that position rather than resisting it.
The cuckold may be present during encounters, receive reports after the fact, be excluded entirely, or be involved in arranging the dynamic. What unites these variations is the erotic relationship to being the one who is not the primary focus of their partner's desire in that moment. See the Cuckolding entry for the full dynamic.
COMMON NAMES
Cuck, the shortened gender-neutral form.
HISTORY
Derives from the Old French cocu, meaning cuckolded husband. The word appears in English from around 1250, in the medieval debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale, and was used consistently through the medieval and early modern periods as a term of public shame. To be a cuckold was to be mocked: Horn Fair, a carnival held annually in London, was a ritual public humiliation of men whose wives had strayed, complete with processions of men wearing horns. No historical figure is recorded as voluntarily claiming the label. The willing self-identification as a cuckold, as an erotic identity rather than a social wound, has no named precedent before the modern kink community. The entire history of the word is one of shame imposed from outside; its adoption as a chosen role is a distinctly contemporary inversion.
- (n.d.). Cuckold. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold
- (2017). A History of the Cuckold's Horns. English Historical Fiction Authors. https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2017/02/a-history-of-cuckolds-horns.html
- (n.d.). The Medieval Origin of a Vile New Insult: Cuck. UBC English Students' Association. https://www.ubcenglish.com/the-medieval-origin-of-cuck/
- (2017). Pathetic stupidity of cuckolds described in medieval Latin literature. Purple Motes. https://www.purplemotes.net/2017/12/03/stupidity-cuckolds/
- (n.d.). The Violent Literary History of Calling Someone a Cuck. InsideHook. https://www.insidehook.com/culture/violent-literary-history-cuck-cuckold