What the Cuck?!

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And I don't just mean some racy language.

I mean it is actually about adult and X-rated content.

Please listen accordingly.

This past May, my colleague Luke Winky, a staff writer at Slate, was doing some work when he opened up the site formerly known as Twitter.

I'm sitting in my living room and I see a post from the official Twitter account of the Democrats.

This account, which has 2.4 million followers, is run by the Democratic Party of the United States.

Not like the Democratic Party of Maine or California, not a specific congressman, just like the Democrats.

The post contained no text other than tagging Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and longtime Trump advisor.

And the body of this post is just a photo of what appears to be kind of like a dingy two-star hotel room.

Picture a mid-tier business hotel.

Beige walls, thin brown carpet, a hanging-framed landscape.

But most important is what's in the foreground.

The core of the photo is this chair.

It's got sort of like a

brown and white weave pattern to it.

It's like, if you have no other context, this just looks like a chair at the double tree or something.

Truly, it's an unremarkable chair.

It's the kind of thing you could scroll right past on Twitter.

And if you thought anything about it at all, it might be, wow, people on social media really share the most banal things.

But Luke did not scroll right past this chair.

He stopped short.

Like if scrolling had tires, his squealed.

Because Luke knew that this seemingly unremarkable hotel chair being tweeted by the Democrats at Stephen Miller was not unremarkable at all.

That is a cuck chair, the platonic ideal of a cuck chair.

What's a cuck chair?

A cuck chair is the chair where a cuck sits when, you know, they do some cuck business.

You may or may not be familiar with the word cuck.

If you have heard it, you may know it as a relatively new dig, dig, widespread online and in the vocabularies of people who spend time there.

You know what they like to call people today?

I've known as cuck.

A cuck.

C-U-C-K.

A cuck.

I had to look up the word cuck.

Everyone was calling me a cuck.

They used to call me a tool.

I went from a tool to a cuck.

It's like the kids on the internet have found a new insult.

When Luke first heard the word cuck, that's what he thought it was too.

A generic insult, a synonym for wimp or tool or sissy that conveniently rhymes with suck and fuck.

But then he learned it can mean something more specific.

I like had to go to Urban Dictionary and I was like, oh, okay, that's what that means.

What Luke found on Urban Dictionary is that a cuck is a man who likes to watch his wife have sex with other men.

And derives sexual pleasure from the humiliation of that.

This fetish is known as cucking or cuckolding.

It is both a real-world sexual habit typically practiced by middle-aged married couples and a popular genre of pornography widely available online.

And very often in that pornography, the cuck can be found in the corner.

I think like the classical image is

a guy sitting on a chair watching his wife have sex with someone else, maybe with the guy with his hands.

It's like, oh my God, this is crazy.

Like looking ashamed on the chair as this is happening.

This is the chair, the chair of head-in-your-hands, shame, humiliation, and arousal.

The Democrats were tweeting at Stephen Miller.

They were ostensibly doing this because of a rumor going around that Miller's wife was having an affair with Elon Musk.

That is to say, the Democrats are dunking on Stephen Miller by calling him a cuck.

As juicy as this particular piece of unconfirmed gossip is, I want to draw your attention to what I think is the big picture here.

And that is that on just an average day, the literal Democratic Party tweeted a picture of a chair that millions of people understood as an insult.

And it came directly from hardcore porn.

The cup chair is like, that's like, you know, that's some like porn hub stuff front and center, you know?

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Pornography is everywhere.

It has never been more easily accessible and it is consumed in enormous quantities by a vast number of adults and many teenagers.

It is a potent force shaping and reflecting our very wants and desires and it is constantly seeping into mainstream culture.

And yet we don't analyze, critique, or even talk about it very much.

Because porn makes us uncomfortable.

Or it makes me uncomfortable anyway.

A couple of years ago, when cuck was already a widespread online insult, a colleague suggested the story behind it might make for a good episode.

I thought it was interesting, but when I started looking into it, I got squicked out.

But the cuck persisted.

By the time the Democrats were taunting Stephen Miller with a cuck chair, I thought, okay, fine.

How did we get here?

The answer is long, twisting, and slippery.

Whenever the cuck's meaning seems settled, a new element gets introduced that alters it.

Those elements include everything from Jacobean dramas to World War II pilots to yes, pornography, as well as a host of deeply American prejudices that have become a lot less submerged over the last 10 years.

So, today, on a not-safe-for-work decoder ring, how the cuck did the cuck go mainstream?

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So whenever we make an episode of Decoder Ring, we have to account for listeners with different levels of familiarity with whatever it is we're talking about, whether it's Parmesan cheese, axolotls, or in this case, a specific genre genre of hardcore pornography.

And so what I want to do first is just get everybody on the same page.

People who know lots about cucking, something about cucking, or nothing about cucking.

I want everyone to come along on this ride.

And that means establishing some pretty basic things about what cucking porn actually is.

Let me go to porn hub right now while we're on the phone.

Hope that it doesn't autoplay anything weird.

You'll be forgiven if it does.

It's worth it.

We'll have to weep that out.

Samantha Cole is one of the co-founders of 404 Media and the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

I asked her to walk me through Pornhub, a website that generates more traffic than either Amazon or Netflix.

It's always been really, really basic.

It's just a grid mostly on the home page.

You hover over a clip, it starts to play a short bit of it.

And that's really like all it is.

It's just like kind of an endless scroll of clips of videos.

Pornhub and the other so-called tube sites, as in they are the YouTubes of porn, have made more pornography available for free than at any point in history.

It's an immense catalog of sexual acts and to make it searchable, all the kinks and fetishes it contains are broken down into every conceivable category.

And these are all, these are based on things people are searching for.

Are you looking at it right now?

Like what are, what are the categories?

So there's ass clapping, ass fucking, ass shaking, ass fuck, ass licking, average ass.

You're going to cut this and it's going to be the greatest clip that's ever been made of me.

Deep throat, depraved, dick sucking lips, dildo dirty, doggy style.

Giant tits 3D,

which apparently there are 2,333 videos available.

And what about the cucking videos?

Hang on.

Let me control F.

Cuck.

Okay.

There's cuck, which is 5,766 videos of just cuck.

Cuckolding, 5,480.

Then there's cuckold, the full word, that is 28,981 videos.

Cuckold humiliation is 40,000 videos.

So that's the most.

I don't want to be coy about what's in these videos.

We're talking about men watching their wives and girlfriends have sex with other men directly in front of them.

Men watching their partners do all the things with someone who is not them.

Think of a threesome where someone is really not involved, where that someone is almost like watching porn, watching a scene, a fantasy unfold in front of them.

Maybe they're sitting in that double tree hotel chair just looking, or maybe they're the ones filming, or they're masturbating, or they're being shamed for having a really small dick, or maybe all of the above and a bunch of other things that you may or may not be able to imagine.

Or let's be real, that you may have already seen.

Because by pretty much every metric, these videos are very popular.

According to Pornhub itself, between 2009 and 2016, searches for cuckled porn increased by 495%.

A set of independent researchers found that in the early 2010s, cuckold was the second most popular pornographic search term on the English language internet behind only variations on young.

So what you have is like numbers behind what people want.

Being able to see such a accurate and frank look at what people are into at any time is

wild.

That's something that, you know, philosophers and psychologists in like the 1800s would die to get.

All this talk of search terms and data and pornhub makes the whole cucking phenomenon sound distinctly 21st century and digital.

Exactly the kind of thing that would flummox experts of the past.

But while it is the case that cuck videos were not accessible or popular until relatively recently, it is also the case that they evolved out of a nearly 1,000-year-old concept those same experts would have known.

Or rather than say evolved, maybe it's better to say

they hatched.

The common cuckoo bird is a trickster.

When it comes time to lay an egg, it sneaks into another bird's nest and lays it there.

And then it just flies off.

The other bird, maybe an unsuspecting meadow pippet or a Eurasian reed warbler or a dunnock, mistakes this newfound intruder egg for its own.

It cares for it even after it hatches.

Humans observing this bird behavior found in it a perfect metaphor for an anxiety of our own.

Another man infiltrating a husband's nest.

And so the cuckoo, or cuckoo, if you will, inspired a brand new word.

A cuckold is a man whose wife is sleeping with another man.

It's that simple.

Jennifer Panak is a professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa who specializes in gender and sexuality in early modern drama.

The cuckold goes back in history a long, long way.

She makes me a cuckold

when

I am at work.

The term cuckold first appeared in English around 1275, though it was likely borrowed from an even older French word.

And it taps directly into men's fears about women's deceitful nature.

They've got this woman who the whole misogynist tradition has told them has strong appetites and is very easy for men to seduce.

So, what they have to do to prove that they are a man is to to keep this devious desire-ridden creature in control.

The man who failed to do this was the cuckold.

He was the man no man wanted to be, the man who was barely a man.

But he was also the man

everybody wanted to talk about.

Starting in the late Middle Ages and snowballing up into the 1700s, the cuckold was an absolute cultural preoccupation.

Not only were real cuckolds publicly shamed, paraded through the streets, their homes marked with horns, the symbol of the cuckold, they were in every kind of writing.

Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, and his peers, their work is chock full of cuckolds.

He's an insult, a punchline, a loser.

And every so often, he's even the tortured heart of the drama.

Like Othello, who becomes wrongly convinced by Iago that his wife Desdemona has cuckolded at him and is consumed with a murderous rage.

Damn her!

Cuckold me!

Oh, tis foul in her.

And with mine officer.

That's fouler.

His reaction quite quickly is:

every man is fated to this because women are untrustworthy, because women are hard to control.

You know how we say there's only two inevitable things, death and taxes?

It was death and cuckoldry.

The only things that are inevitable are death and cuckoldry.

As terrifying and humiliating as getting cuckolded was thought to be, there was one loophole, a way for the poor pathetic cuckold to turn the tables and take back the power.

Can you tell me about the Whittle?

Ah, the Whittle.

Okay, a Whittle is a man whose wife is sleeping with another man, and he knows about it, and he's perfectly fine with it.

Standing for a witting cuckold, the Whittle is a character who shows up occasionally in Elizabethan-era literature.

The Whittle is not a ridiculous or tragic figure, because unlike his counterpart, the Cuckold,

the Whittle has decided to live totally stress-free.

Well, my wife is going to sleep around, and there's nothing I can do about it, so I might as well profit from it.

because her lover will give her all sorts of money and gifts and I will take my share and I will simply enjoy myself.

The man who knowingly lets his wife have sex with another man maintains a kind of control.

And so he doesn't have anxiety.

He doesn't have jealousy.

He's got this sweet deal.

But even in the case of the Whittle, the rewards are purely financial.

For both the Whittle and the classic cuckold, there is no sexual gratification to be found.

Nowhere in anything that I've read is there any sense of a man taking any kind of sexual pleasure in the idea of his wife sleeping with another man?

Nobody's getting turned on by it.

And so the cuckold of the past is far away from the cuck of today, the cuck of Pornhub, who is absolutely looking for sexual pleasure from his own humiliation.

But these two things, the old-timey cuckold and the modern-day cuck, will come to connect.

And to see how we actually have to turn away from the word cuckold and instead take a look at sexual desires that have been lurking around with no name at all for a very long time

like all the way back to 400 bce

The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about an ancient king named Candales who was so filled with a desire for his advisor to see his wife's beauty, he encouraged him to hide behind her bedroom door and watch her undress.

This scene was further fleshed out in a blatantly horny painting from the 1600s that's like the Flemish Rococo forerunner of cockporn.

A couple centuries later, in the 1870s, Leopold von Sacher-Massock wrote Venus in Furs, a novella based on his own life.

The term masochism was inspired by this book, in which a man begs for his wife to degrade him, including by having sex with other men.

And history is dappled with examples like this, including less highbrow ones, like underground pornographic comic books from the 1940s, where Mickey Mouse watches Donald Duck get it on with Minnie.

You can think of it all as cucking avant la lette.

Cucking before it had a name, but seems to have been a fantasy for some, bubbling out into plain sight.

only sporadically.

But cucking today is not so undercover, and it certainly has a name.

And that's because in the middle of the 20th century, these hidden impulses started to get organized.

When we come back, the cuckolding of the past transforms into a lifestyle.

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So So, we have arrived now in the 20th century.

In the 1900s, if you were to talk about a cuckold, people would know what you mean-a man whose wife is cheating on him against his will.

But the word was pretty antiquated, it's not getting tossed around like it used to a couple hundred years before.

Simultaneously, there is this stealth sexual desire out there to see one's wife with another man.

And what's going to happen as the 20th century unfolds is this word and this desire are going to hook up.

That hookup is only possible because the hush-hush desire stops being so hush-hush and actually becomes an organized sexual practice involving real people.

And I found just the expert to tell me about that.

My name is David Lay.

With last name Lay, right, I really only had a couple of options.

I could be a sex doctor or a politician involved in a sex scandal.

You could lay bricks.

You could be a brick layer.

That's right.

That's good.

Nice.

I didn't heard that one before.

I went the sex doctor route.

David, whose last name is spelled L-E-Y, is a sex therapist and clinical psychologist.

A little more than 15 years ago, he was conducting a study about non-monogamy.

In the course of it, I ran into these couples that live the cuckold lifestyle where the wife is having sex typically with other men with the husband's enthusiastic permission and support.

And I'd never heard about it before.

And my initial reaction, to be perfectly honest, was that's crazy.

But David was intrigued enough that he kept talking to these couples to find out more.

The couples that I encountered that were into this, they've been married for decades.

They were very successful business people.

They had successful kids.

They had some of the most remarkable communication skills of any couples I've ever seen.

And it led me to question, how did I assume that this must be unhealthy?

David dove into the topic even further, eventually publishing Insatiable Wives, a history and consideration of all kinds of non-monogamous sexual practices, and one of the first books to look seriously at cucking.

And one of the things David learned is that in America, a lot of this behavior can be traced back to an unexpected cohort.

The American fighter jet community, Post-War Cho.

World War II was an air war.

The first blow and the last was delivered by air.

During World War II, pilots had terrifyingly high mortality rates.

One in three died, meaning also that one in three of their wives was widowed.

Many new Aces, many empty places.

Victory, victory, death, victory, victory.

These

pilots going Maktu with their hair on fire all day long, they could die at a moment's notice, and they had this tight brotherhood with other pilots, and they were sharing their wives.

With death always looming, these couples had begun to engage in a kind of group marriage.

One of the things we see in folks exploring really any form of consensual non-monogamy is they tend to be high sensation seekers, adrenaline junkie kind of people, and that comes out in their sexual practices as well as their life.

After the war, these couples moved off airbases and into the brand new suburbs.

There, in single-family homes with no relatives afoot, they had more privacy than married couples had ever had before.

In the houses next door lived other GIs, many of whom had themselves been exposed to European sexual mores.

All the while, the culture was becoming more permissive, sexually speaking, as laws regulating obscenity and pornography loosened.

By the 1960s, partner swapping started to emerge from the underground as it transformed into the lifestyle that would become known as swinging.

What is the swinging movement?

Well, it's a couples movement.

Couples that want to be free-thinking, free-living adult couples.

They would rather get involved with other people, but together with their spouses.

The so-called swinging lifestyle dovetailed perfectly with the sexual revolution, the availability of birth control, and women's liberation.

And soon swinging was in the news, in the name of a best-selling Polaroid camera, in books like John Updike's Couples, in films like Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and in an episode of All in the Family.

There was a time when our marriage got a little boring.

Then we discovered swinging.

Swinging?

Is that what you call it?

Yeah.

What do you call it?

Communism.

Their communal instincts in this one area aside, swingers were far from pinkos.

They were definitionally married and stereotypically suburbanites.

In fact, to this day, swingers tend to swing conservative.

The swinging community, the lifestyle folks, most of them are Republican.

Most of them come from more conservative political backgrounds.

Swingers are hardly the first people in history to engage in non-monogamy, but they were unprecedentedly well-organized about it.

By the 1970s, swingers, magazines, parties, communities, and clubs like Plato's Retreat in New York City existed all over the country.

Plato's Retreat, located in the Ansonia Hotel, is a unique club open to free-thinking adult couples.

The swinging lifestyle was wide-ranging and not limited to a single kind of sexual practice.

It encompassed partner swapping, but also group sex, voyeurism, and what we would now call cucking.

As you can hear in this exchange from a 1970s television roundtable discussion.

Have you seen Bronnie make love to another man?

Yes, I did.

When we got home, I thought it was great.

We made love three hours when we got home together.

Not everyone who was interested in the lifestyle had access to a like-minded community, let alone a place like Plato's Retreat.

And not everyone who was interested was interested enough to actually want to go out and do any of these things.

But conveniently, for both people seeking a community and those just turned on by a fantasy, the 1990s provided a technological solution.

Most people use the internet for communications, but that can mean a lot more than just emailing messages to friends.

The internet gave people all around the world a new way to explore their interests, including their kinks.

And in the early days, a lot of that exploration happened on message boards like Usenet.

Usenet has thousands of discussion groups on diverse subjects.

Let's say you're into world travel or birdwatching.

Or maybe you're into nude sunbathing.

Here, people finally had a place to talk about what they liked sexually, to find people who liked it too, and to trade Polaroids and amateur homemade pornographic videotapes with those same people.

Soon, Usenet was full of erotic fiction, including one story called Cuckold's Confession, which in its particulars is extremely similar to contemporary visual cuckolding porn.

Cuckolding started showing up in the descriptions of amateur porn featuring group sex.

And then in 1996, on the Usenet forum Alt.sex, a member posted a message saying, so you're a cuckold or you wanna be one.

Now is your chance.

Tell me true stories about how you have been humiliated by your wife and or her lovers.

This line is cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first known use of cuckold to carry its contemporary meaning.

Not just a man whose wife is sleeping with someone else, but a man who gets off on his wife sleeping with someone else.

And you can hear in that post that cuckold wasn't meant as an insult.

It's not some Shakespearean style diss.

So you're a cuckold or you want to be one.

That's the vibe.

It was an in-group term, a way to identify your interests among people who shared them.

And this was also true for the shortened form, cuck, which now also began to be bandied around on message boards.

As the millennium turned and the internet got faster and able to actually host videos, it all started to multiply.

In 2001, Cucking gets a dedicated message board on adultcommunitiesonline.com.

A site called Cuckolds Place is founded in 2004.

In 2008, the sexual social network FetLife goes online, helping to build a robust Cuckolding community.

And this is just around the time that sites like Pornhub really get cranking.

And so Cuck is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular search terms in porn.

And what I want to ask now is just

why?

Why is cucking so appealing to so many?

I think it is surprising to people.

Dr.

Justin Lemmiller is a social psychologist and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, who also writes a sex column.

And back in the 2010s, he started fielding the same question over and over again.

Which was like, why am I turned on by the idea of watching my wife be with other men?

He says part of the answer is that people are excited by what they aren't supposed to do.

Sex therapist Jack Buran coined the term the erotic equation, which basically means attraction plus obstacles equals excitement, right?

So if there's something where you even have like the slightest inkling to want to do it, and then you're told you can't do it, that makes it all the more tantalizing.

It's kind of like reverse psychology in a way.

And when it comes specifically to cucking, it's reverse psychology that applies to a lot of people.

For Justin's book, Tell Me What You Want, he surveyed 4,175 American adults about hundreds of fantasies, including cucking, which is not niche at all.

What I found was that it's a very common fantasy.

A majority of men across orientations reported having fantasized about watching their partner be with somebody else before.

52%, to be precise.

It wasn't quite as common among women.

You know, women were not as turned on overall by this idea of cuckholding, particularly the idea of watching their partner be with somebody else.

Women were more likely to fantasize about being with someone else while their partner watches them.

But for men, I'd say it's so common as to be a pretty normative interest in the population.

And that, again, is not despite the centuries of social stigma prohibiting this exact behavior, but because of it.

It makes us want to try it out even more.

The more prohibited something is, in fact, the more desirable it may be.

Justin really saw this when he broke down his data in an unexpected way.

By looking at politics.

What I see in my research is that what is taboo for people in your political party tends to be something that people are more likely to eroticize.

So, for example, Justin found that Democrats are more likely to fantasize about BDSM than Republicans.

Presumably, this is because liberals are warier about exerting force and authority over others, exactly the kind of power dynamics BDSM plays around with.

And as for infidelity and non-monogamy, while they have long been cultural taboos for everybody, Justin found that they seem to be especially potent for Republicans.

Conservative values promote traditional ideas of marriage where you're with one person for the rest of your life till death to you part.

And so conservatives are actually more interested in cuckholding.

64% of heterosexual male Republicans reported having cuckholding fantasies compared to 49% of Democrats.

Republicans on average have more fantasies about things like cuckholding and infidelity and group sex, basically all of these fantasies that play around with non-monogamy in one form or another.

All of this is to say taboos turn people on.

And the more potent a taboo is, the hotter it may be.

And I think this goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of cucking porn.

Not only does it flout all the taboos we've just mentioned about how married men are supposed to behave monogamously, authoritatively, and taboos about how women are supposed to behave chastely, it flouts even more besides.

Because there's something I haven't mentioned yet.

And it's that at this moment in the 2000s, when cucking is getting popular, it's also getting a consistent racial dynamic.

The cuck and his wife wife are almost always white, and the man screwing the wife is almost always black.

When we come back, the next extremely gnarly chapter in this story, when the cuck gets racialized and becomes a force in American politics.

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But will it be too late?

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Around 2011, Marie Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara, was at a writer's retreat with a group of other academics while she was working on her book, A Taste for Brown Sugar, Black Women in Pornography.

And we would always get into these conversations about what was happening in porn.

There's a porn for everything.

And also, have you seen this really great clip where this woman has this amazing orgasm?

And have you seen this amazing thing where these guys are really hot?

That's when a friend and colleague told her about cucking, and that this was really about a white couple inviting a black man in to have sex with the white woman in front of the husband.

So, we started watching it together, and we were like, Oh my god, there's so much going on here.

Marae and her colleague started working on a scholarly article about it, which meant, among other things, analyzing a lot of modern cucking pornography.

Every time I click on a cuckolding video, I'm kind of shocked by what I find.

Murray saw that there are certain genre conventions you can expect to see across these videos.

You already know about the cuck, who tends to get all the attention.

The idea of a man who would choose to be humiliated in this fashion is treated like the wild headline of this arrangement.

But there are two other participants, and they have names and roles as well.

The woman is often referred to as the hot wife.

She may have certain tattoos, like a black spade, that are common in the cuckolding lifestyle.

And then there's the third participant, the other man.

He's often known as the BBC.

Which means big black cock.

That is C-O-C-K.

Like that's all they are, like making black men fully into these like mindless sex machines.

This man is a sexualized figure for both the hot wife and the cuck.

There is a lot of homoeroticism in these scenarios.

Even so, this man is referred to as a bull or a man dingo, racial epithets that come directly out of slavery and that were used to describe a specific kind of enslaved person.

Strong black men that would be used to breed other slaves that were forced into sex with other slaves who are not their wives or lovers in order to produce more capital for slave owners.

Racialized cucking videos are a subset of a long-standing porn genre known as interracial, which features black men and white women.

Pornography featuring black women is known by the genre name ebony.

Interracial porn plays upon centuries-old stereotypes, hang-ups, and projections by white people about the sexual danger represented by black men, pernicious, nefarious delusions that have been used to justify violence against them.

And Marais says that some interracial cucking videos can be shockingly specific.

Sometimes you would think that they must have a PhD in 19th century American eugenic history.

The way that they are so specifically fascinated with the idea that a black man's sperm may impregnate this woman and that is erotic to them.

To be clear, most cuckolding porn does not contain this exact fixation on impregnation and miscegenation, but it does often involve some kind of fetishization of the black man's cum.

And much of it does involve a white couple and a black man.

That is to say, it often rests on taboos and terms that come straight out of a horrifying chapter of American history.

When I look at cuckolding pornography that's specifically racialized, it's like its connection to our past is inescapable to me.

It's so obvious.

But what Murray found is that the racialization of cuck porn is a fairly new development.

In the 70s and 80s, there wasn't always a racial element that was part of the cuckold fantasy.

It was much more loosey-goosey then.

But we start to get to see this real solidification of what the genre is focused on in the 2000s to almost be exclusively about racial cuckolding.

By the late 2000s, cucking had arrived at an inflection point.

As the so-called tube sites were coming online and making more triple X content available for free than ever before.

They were slowly introducing millions of people to names, genres, and terms that may have been previously niche, including cucking.

In 2008, according to an IMDb-style website for porn, the number of pornographic movies about cucking increased dramatically.

And Pornhub itself says the category started to explode, eventually in 2016, by nearly 500%.

There's no one clear explanation for why this happened, but Murray points out that it was part of a larger trend.

You start to see this move towards racial cuckolding at the same time that black and interracial pornography is exploding.

And the whole period when all of this was happening, when access to gargantuan quantities of free porn was becoming a bedrock fact of American life, and cucking porn in particular was taking off, say from 2008 to 2016, It all overlaps with something else when Barack Obama was president of the United States.

So it's when America's first black president is in office that American men, and perhaps conservative ones in particular, are familiarizing themselves with and sometimes embracing taboo cucking fantasies in their private lives.

And it's at the end of Obama's tenure that some of those same men are finally going to launch cuck into the public sphere.

Not as a desire, but as a vicious insult.

After everything,

in this final for now chapter, the cuck is going to head back to its Shakespearean roots to once again become a slur, but with whole new layers of meaning.

And it starts to happen, as so much in this episode has.

in the wilds of the web.

At the time, I was a tech reporter reporter at BuzzFeed, and part of my assignment was to keep tabs on like the fringes of the internet, the dark corners, as we would have called it then.

John Herman is now a tech columnist at New York Magazine, but in the late 2000s, he was tasked with reporting on a mess of anonymous, uncensored message boards and forums, places like Something Awful and 4chan, largely used by young men jockeying to be as provocative as possible.

Almost every thread was some sort of like running attempt to escalate.

This is a place where you would have people using racial slurs and gendered slurs and homophobic slurs just to sort of talk with one another.

And as John poked around, he saw that the young men hanging out in these petri dishes of shock humor, memes, gamerspeak, men's rights activism, and pickup culture were sometimes flaming each other with a new term.

They were calling each other cucks.

You can really clearly tell that this is because of their familiarity with porn.

They can say it and it immediately evokes like, you know, images and themes and like categories on porn sites.

In 2009, 10, 11, the cuck's revival as an epithet wasn't well known outside certain online spaces.

You'd have to be a tech reporter like John, tasked with keeping tabs on this world to know that cuck was occasionally being tossed around on message boards to call someone a wimp or a weakling or a phony.

It isn't yet an insult that's in actual use.

It's a weird and specific thing to call someone.

In fact, if you search for it on Twitter at the time, mostly what you would turn up is porn.

That started to change in 2013.

That's when very online young men became furious that progressive, inclusive, social justice warrior bullshit, as they might put it, was seeping into video games.

Under no circumstances should we share our most beloved hobby with screeching, vindictive, ignorant feminists who know nothing about gaming.

They began to use the term cuck as part of the sustained online harassment campaign known as Gamergate.

This put the word as an insult in front of a lot more people.

And then in June of 2015, Donald Trump rolled down an escalator at Trump Tower.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am officially running

for President of the United States,

and we are going to make our country great again.

When Trump entered the presidential race, just about everyone, including in the Republican establishment, dismissed him as unserious and unhinged.

He was a reality TV star whose companies had gone bankrupt many times over and whose major political role to this point had been a decade spent harassing Barack Obama about his birth certificate.

You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country.

He may not have been born in this country.

But Trump had a lot of fans online, those same young men who populated sites like 4chan, who were enamored as he just rolled over and through the Republican field.

There was huge fascination with the way that he dominated his opponents.

So his character in these worlds sort of took off.

Within two weeks of Trump announcing his candidacy, his online supporters had banded together on a Reddit forum called the Donald.

This wildly pro-Trump community that was calling each other cucks and calling everyone else cucks, you know, very comfortable throwing the word around as an insult.

The Donald started growing rapidly, and from there, the cucks started to spread more widely.

By July, Rush Limbaugh was favorably comparing Trump to the Republican field in these exact terms.

If Trump were your average, ordinary, cuck-olded Republican, he would have apologized by now.

The cuck was now teetering right on the edge of breaking out, and it was going to get pushed over that edge by some of the other denizens of the dark corners of the internet.

White nationalists.

It's not just that they are leftists and cucks.

That's the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

Indeed, one wonders if these people are people at all.

In the white nationalist worldview, the white race is under constant threat from both people of color and what they call race traitors.

When the word cuck started showing up online, they immediately recognized it as a useful and potent dog whistle.

It was a way to call someone an emasculated race lover and pervert.

while sounding to outsiders like nothing more than a synonym for wimp or weakling.

They also believe in a conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement, in which a cabal of elites conspire to replace the white race with immigrants.

In the context of the 2015 Republican presidential primary, this meant they were drawn to the campaign rhetoric of one candidate in particular.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.

They're not sending you.

They're not sending you.

They're sending people that have lots of problems, problems and they're bringing those problems with us.

They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists and some, I assume, are good people.

But when they looked at the rest of the Republican field, white nationalists found it wanting.

And rather than say exactly why, that they believed any candidate or supporter willing to negotiate on immigration and accept multiculturalism was a race traitor with a perverse desire to let the white nation, white race, and white women get fucked by people of color.

They just used a new variant on an old word to say it for them.

So conservative is a thing, and it sort of sums up what has happened to the Republican Party.

This is Gavin McGinnis, the founder of the far-right fascist organization, the Proud Boys, explaining the term on a far-right YouTube channel.

The entire right wing have become such pussies, kow-towing to the left because they're so scared of being seen as racist and they are so quick to tell everyone how ashamed they are of being white males.

This cockservative movement, that is the problem with the right today.

Cuckservative was the one that finally caught on.

And it's weird.

It's a weird one to catch on.

It's awkward.

It's so much less forceful

and versatile seeming than Cuck, but it was the one that broke through.

This was the moment.

Now that it was part of this other term that seemed to speak to the inter-Nicene, newsworthy battles within the Republican Party, Cuck finally came out of the shadows.

In July and August of 2015, Cuckservatives started flying around Twitter and Reddit and burst into publications like The Washington Post and The Guardian, and almost never with a full explanation of what it meant and where it came from.

Even John Herman struggled with writing about this.

By this time, he was working at the New York Times.

He knew the whole backstory about porn and 4chan and racism, and he wanted to convey it to his readers, but he found it hard to compress all of that into one story in a family newspaper.

I was trying to figure out how to put it into the right language and haggling with editors about how to say cuck in the paper.

So here's what John wrote in a piece about Trump's support on his devoted subreddit, The Donald.

I said,

opponents on the Donald are referred to as cuckservative, as in cuckold, now used as a derisive term for liberals and moderate Republicans, recently popularized by far-right online commentators and white nationalists.

Which, you know, you know, I think that article turned out fine for what it was, but I would have been much more interested in sort of dwelling on that at the time.

But one of the things that I'm interested in is like the step that it takes from like porn and like the internet's like dark underwear drawer into the things that like your parents might have heard of this word and like the kind of whitewashing that just automatically has to happen to even define it, where it's like, it comes out of a sexual practice.

Maybe even it comes out of like a racialized sexual practice.

And just even the sentence you can write, like immediately just like drops all the things that are actually like meaningful and central and disturbing and actually what it is.

Like it's obscured.

Right.

And also, if you did just sort of stop right there in an article about Reddit and be like, okay, let's talk about why they're calling each other cucks here.

You would probably end up with a more honest assessment of what they were up to and why they were up to it.

This is really what I want to take from this moment.

That because of our squeamishness about porn, to say nothing of interracial sex and racism, we were not up to the task of describing and comprehending a world awash in it.

To really explain what the hell was meant by cuck in the middle of the 2016 election.

To do more than say, hey, here's this novel term that sounds like a curse word.

And huh, it has something to do with porn.

And whoa, all the kids are using it and now Republicans are slamming each other with it.

To get to the gnarly, scary, telling racism of it all would have required both a willingness to learn about or admit knowledge of a pornographic subgenre and a forum in which you could explain all of it not antiseptically, but graphically enough so that people could really understand.

By like not getting stuck on that context and by not sort of really belaboring the point about like where this came from and why it came from there, you really do sort of like, you don't let it happen, but you help it a little bit happen.

You help cuck become just another word, which is pretty much what it is now.

Since this feverish period during Trump's first election, it has persisted.

both as an insult and even more as a mode of pornography, if one that is less racialized than it was in the 2010s.

Both remain so common that, well, the Democrats could just tweet about them.

This is, you'll recall, how this whole excavation of the cuck got started.

The Democratic Party tweeting a picture of a cuck chair at a Trump advisor.

After seeing that tweet, I wanted to understand how we had gotten to a place where the Democrats were insulting their opponents with an image out of pornography.

And now I think you can follow along when I tell you the answer is improbably something like this.

In the beginning, there was a cuckoo bird whose nesting behavior birthed a Shakespearean era insult that was eventually grafted onto a real-life sexual practice codified by suburban swingers.

That practice became an extremely popular mode of pornography, one so widespread that 4chan users and white nationalists could take from its very name an incredibly versatile, incredibly racist insult.

And then that insult, like the porn itself, so fully permeated our discourse and our culture that the Democrats would think nothing of tossing around a cucking meme on just some random day.

And just consider all the other wild things that pornography might tell us about our culture that we ought to know

if we can only get over the embarrassment and think about it.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

There is a lot of material, none of it x-rated, I should say, that I use to research this piece, and you can find it all on our show page.

We also have a bonus episode exclusively for Slate Plus listeners.

It's It's a conversation I had with the author and culture critic Sophie Gilbert about her new cultural history, Girl on Girl.

It is not about the cuck, but it is about how pornography influences so much popular culture and specifically the pop culture of the 2000s.

This was really the moment when porn was becoming, I would say, America's number one cultural pastime.

But quietly, like sort of sneakily in the background.

To hear more, sign up for Slate Plus.

You can do that from the Decodering show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Or visit slate.com/slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen.

This episode was written by me.

It was edited by Josh Levine.

It was produced by Katie Shepard, me, Max Friedman, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer.

Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director, and we had helped this episode from Sophie's Summer Grad.

I'd like to thank Gabriel Roth, Talya Lavin, Tatum Hunter, Rebecca Fassman, Jessica Stoya, Aiden Starr, Perrin Swanmore, Sophie Gilbert, and Kevin Heffernan, who was a font of knowledge.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

You can also call us on our phone number.

That is 347-460-7281.

We love to hear from you guys, and we will see you in two weeks.

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Hi, I'm Josh Levine.

My podcast, The Queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor.

She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer.

She was also given the title The Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor.

Now, it's time to hear her real story.

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The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are.

Subscribe to The Queen on Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.