Cuckold: Encyclopedia - Cuckold

Cuckold

A cuckold is a person with a sexually unfaithful partner, typically a married man. There are connotations of helplessness and humiliation attributed to the word: implications that the husband lacks the strength to enforce the fidelity due to a man, and too weak or henpecked to leave or divorce her. Although historically it was a term used socially, when a man's wife gave birth to a child not his, nowadays it is more commonly associated with sexuality, and especially power exchange, sexual humiliation and erotic sexual denial.

Cuckold - History of the term

"Cuckold" appears in older texts as a highly insulting and pejorative term.

Cuckolds are sometimes written of as "wearing the horns of a cuckold" or just "wearing the horns". This goes back to an unsubstantiated reference to a tradition in villages of unknown European location where the community gathers to collectively humiliate a man whose wife gives birth to a child recognizably not his own. This is said to have been a parade where the hapless husband is forced to wear antlers on his head as a symbol of his wife’s infidelity. Whether this actually happened or not is irrelevant to the phrase, which survived.

The history of the word is thought to be related to the Cuckoo bird, who is known to put its eggs in another bird's nest. Some think that this points to another hallmark of the cuckold—the raising of a child that is not his own.

In Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Miller's Tale is a story that humorously examines the life of a cuckold.

Cuckold - Cultural usage

In Italy and spanish-speaking countries, "horns" are a metaphor for suffering the infidelity of a partner, not limited to husbands in modern usage. However, the use of the term dates from the Roman empire, since legionaries returning from the war were given horns as a triumph or prize. So, the use of the term is a mockery of the husband, victorious in the battlefield, but defeated in his own bed. The gesture of the horned hand can be used to insult the cuckold; the Italian translation, cornuto literally means horned (This sometimes causes confusion in Italians who are learning English and encounter the word horny). The Spanish word for a consenting cuckold, cabrón, has such an offensive nuance that it is a taboo word rarely used with its original meaning, "he-goat". However, according to the tone and the relation to the addressed, it can be even laudatory.

The Chinese term for "cuckold" translates as "wearing a green hat".

Cuckold - Recent usage

The term has made a resurgence starting in the late 20th century amongst couples where a dominant female takes on additional partners, while a submissive male is either monogamous to her, denied sex altogether, or only performs oral sex on her. Some dominant women have their male partner watch them have sex with others, but the more common practice is for the domme to go out on dates while her sub or slave stays at home. Some dominants have their sub or slave perform oral sex on them after they have had sex with another man. (See felching.) In some cases, the dominant woman's sex partner may be submissive to her, while other times, she simply engages in vanilla sex with him.

Most female-dominant couples who practice cuckolding tend to be in their thirties or older. It is not unusual for the dominant woman to take on younger men when cuckolding her primary partner. In these cases the younger partner is a mere "toyboy" and there is little possibility of a romantic relationship developing.

Cuckolding may also be part of the practice of male dominant-female submissive couples. A submissive wife may be "naughty" with another man with her husband's knowledge and permission, then return to tell him about the betrayal and submit to punishment from the husband. The husband may or may not be himself faithful. If he is faithful to his submissive wife, it might be to help place him in a position of moral authority to discipline her for her infidelities.

One form of cuckolding is the "interracial cuckold". This almost always involves a white couple and a black male. The premise of this cuckold is the myth that black males are sexually superior to their white counterparts -- that they are stronger, have more stamina and larger genitalia than the white husband. It enforces the idea that the primary partner is being displaced. Because of this the white wife might deny her husband in the bedroom, forcing him to watch her copulate with the dominant "black bull", often relegated to simple masturbation. Some see this as a form of retribution or vengeance for the historical dominance of the white man. The "revenge" is that the white man's greatest "prize", the white woman, now prefers the more sexually potent black man. Ironically this "revenge" is based in stereotypes. One of the oldest and most popular interracial pornogrpahy websites to address "interracial cuckoldry" is http://www.blacknwhite.com.

Cuckolding among female-dominant couples differs from the original definition of cuckolding in that many of these men are voluntarily "cuckolded" by their wives, as part of the husband's sexual fantasy of gaining sexual pleasure from being humiliated by his wife; indeed, the husband may even be the instigator of this practice, raising questions about who is truly the dominant partner. This is a common theme in letters to pornographic magazines. In addition, and ironically, according to unconfirmed anecdotes from employees at adult video stores, "interracial" (black male/white female) pornography is most often bought by white men, and relatively seldom by black men or white women. It is unclear how common this phenomenon is in real life as opposed to fantasy. In the fantasy realm, the wife of a cuckold is sometimes referred to as a hotwife. In a broader context, the contrast between a cuckold and bull is sometimes used to summarize an individual's personality or behaviour; the bull representing an aggressive alpha male and the cuckold suggesting weakness, fear and vulnerability.

See also

• Adultery
• Human sexual behavior
• Human sexuality
• Humiliatrix
• Paternity testing

Categories: Marriage | Sexual fidelity | Sexual fetishism | Pejorative terms for people

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Cuckold", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki