Decoder Ring | What the Cuck?!

Summary

Podcast Summary: Decoder Ring | What the Cuck?!

Podcast: Slow Burn (Slate Podcasts)
Host: Willa Paskin
Episode Date: October 8, 2025

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Overview: Main Theme and Purpose

This episode of Decoder Ring takes a deep dive into the journey of the term "cuck"—from its medieval literary origins as an insult, through its rise as a sexual kink, to its explosive entry into American political and internet discourse. The episode unpacks how a niche pornographic trope became a surprisingly potent insult, weaponized in far-right political circles, and ultimately, mainstreamed to the point that major political parties use its symbols to mock opponents publicly. Through interviews with scholars, sex researchers, and journalists, the episode shows how the story of "cuck" reveals larger truths about American anxieties around sex, race, masculinity, and power.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Viral Origins: A Chair, a Tweet, and a Political Dunk

• The incident:
  The episode opens with journalist Luke Winkie confronting an odd tweet from the official Democratic Party account—a photo of a drab hotel chair, tagged at Trump advisor Stephen Miller ([01:43]).
• Insider joke:
  For those in the know, the chair is a "cuck chair," symbolizing a porn trope where a man watches his wife have sex with another man, representing humiliation and arousal ([03:08] Luke Winkie).

"That is a cuck chair. The platonic ideal of a cuck chair." – Luke Winkie ([03:08])

• Significance:
  Willa Paskin frames this as a moment where pornography's images and ideas have so permeated mainstream culture that a subtle porn reference becomes a shared, if coded, political insult ([05:17]).

2. Defining the Term: "Cuck," Cuckolding, and Pornography

• What is 'cuck' in porn?:
  Samantha Cole, author and co-founder of 404 Media, walks through Pornhub's categories, noting the explosion in "cuckold" and "cuck" content online ([09:49]).
• Extreme popularity:
  Pornhub reported a 495% increase in searches for cuckold porn between 2009 and 2016 ([11:18]), and research shows "cuckold" was the second most popular English-language porn search in the early 2010s ([12:57]).

"What you have is numbers behind what people want... that's something that philosophers and psychologists in the 1800s would die to get." – Samantha Cole ([12:57])

3. The Historical Roots: Cuckoldry From Chaucer to the Modern Era

• Ancient insult:
  English professor Jennifer Panek explains that "cuckold" dates to the 13th century, with metaphorical links to the cuckoo bird and male anxieties about paternity and female fidelity ([14:38]).
• Cultural obsession:
  Cuckolds were mocked in literature (Chaucer, Shakespeare) and life, their perceived weakness emblematic of existential male fears ([15:14]).
• The "wittle":
  The "witting cuckold" appears in Elizabethan literature as a husband who knowingly tolerates his wife's affairs—though for financial, not sexual, gain ([17:12]).

"Nowhere in anything that I've read is there any sense of a man taking any kind of sexual pleasure... Nobody's getting turned on by it." – Jennifer Panek ([18:22])

• Evolution of fantasy:
  The episode traces voyeuristic and humiliation fantasies throughout history, including Herodotus' accounts, Renaissance paintings, and the novella Venus in Furs ([18:36]).

4. Cucking Becomes Lifestyle: Swingers, Pilot Culture, and the Internet

• Modern cucking emerges:
  Sex therapist Dr. David Ley explains how consensual non-monogamy, including cucking, took root among tight-knit communities such as post-WWII American fighter pilots ([25:16]).
• Suburbanization and the "Swinger" movement:
  In the ‘60s and ‘70s, swinging and group sex grew with the sexual revolution, privacy of suburbia, and loosening of morals ([26:58]).
• Online expansion:
  The Internet allowed fantasies to morph into visible, organized communities—Usenet, forums, then specialized sites like "Cuckold's Place" and Fetlife ([29:45]). The Oxford English Dictionary traces the sexual use of "cuckold" to a 1996 Usenet post ([29:47]).
• Why is cucking so appealing?:
  Dr. Justin Lehmiller details research showing over half of men (and many women) fantasize about watching a partner with someone else; taboo increases desire, and politics plays a role ([32:11]).

"...attraction plus obstacles equals excitement." – Dr. Justin Lehmiller ([32:37])
"64% of heterosexual male Republicans reported having cuckolding fantasies, compared to 49% of Democrats." – Dr. Justin Lehmiller ([34:56])

5. From Porn to Politics: Race, Taboo, and the Fetishization of Power

• Racialization of cucking:
  Mireille Miller-Young, professor of feminist studies, analyzes how, in the 2000s, "cuckolding" porn adopted a consistent racial dynamic: the "cuck" and his wife are white, and the "bull" is black ([39:00]). This taps directly into America's racial history, with tropes of sexual threat and taboo ([40:09]).
• Connection to American history:
  The fetishization is shockingly specific, sometimes playing on fears of miscegenation and eugenic anxieties dating back to slavery ([41:27]).
• Timing:
  The rise of "racial cucking" in porn coincides with the Obama era and the mainstreaming of Internet porn ([42:50]).

6. The Meme-ification and Weaponization of "Cuck" Online

• Message board migration:
  John Herman, tech journalist, details how "cuck" became an insult on 4chan and other online forums, originally linked to knowledge of porn subgenres ([45:24]).
• Gamergate and spreading usage:
  In 2013, during Gamergate, "cuck" evolves into a favored slur for men seen as weak, woke, or capitulating to progressivism ([46:24]).
• Political crossover:
  The term "cuckservative" (cuck + conservative) explodes during the Trump campaign, used by far-right groups and white nationalists to attack mainstream conservatives ([48:08]; [51:23]), equating compromise with racial and masculine betrayal.

"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." – Willa Paskin ([48:25])

• Mainstream media struggles:
  Herman describes the challenge of reporting on the term for the New York Times due to its explicit context ([52:08]).

7. The Cuck Goes Mainstream: The Legacy and Where We Are Now

• Whitewashing the word:
  As the word enters mainstream conversation, its origins in porn and racist subtext become obscured—even as those meanings fuel its power ([53:16]).
• Coda:
  The episode circles back to the Democratic Party tweet, now reinterpreted as a symbol not of insider knowledge but of how thoroughly explicit online culture has saturated public life ([54:36]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Men watching their partners do all the things with someone who is not them... 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." – Willa Paskin ([11:43])
• "Death and cuckoldry, the only things that are inevitable..." – Jennifer Panek, paraphrasing a Shakespearean common belief ([16:39])
• "One of the things we see in folks exploring any form of consensual non-monogamy is that they tend to be high-sensation seekers, adrenaline junkie kind of people..." – David Ley ([26:05])
• "What is taboo for people in your political party tends to be something that people are more likely to eroticize." – Justin Lehmiller ([34:07])
• "Sometimes you would think that they must have a PhD in 19th century American eugenic history, the way they are so specifically fascinated with the idea that a black man's sperm may impregnate this woman and that is erotic to them." – Mireille Miller-Young ([41:27])
• "Cuckservative was the one that finally caught on... it was the one that broke through." – John Herman ([51:11])
• "To really explain what the hell was meant by 'cuck' in the middle of the 2016 election ... 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." – Willa Paskin ([53:30])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:37–05:17: The viral "cuck chair" tweet and decoding of the image’s pornographic meaning
• 09:49–14:38: Samantha Cole walks through the basics and online statistics of cuckold porn
• 14:38–18:36: Jennifer Panek traces the origins and historical development of "cuckold"
• 22:55–29:45: Dr. David Ley on the lifestyle transition from insult to organized sexual practice and the influence of military and suburban life
• 32:11–35:04: Dr. Justin Lehmiller presents sexual fantasy research and political breakdowns
• 39:00–42:50: Mireille Miller-Young analyzes the racialization of cuck porn and its deep American roots
• 44:56–48:08: John Herman on the migration of "cuck" from porn to online insult, meme culture, and the political right
• 51:11–54:36: "Cuckservative," the mainstreaming of the insult, media hesitancy, and whitewashing of origins

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Structure & Flow

• The episode skillfully interweaves historical context, cultural analysis, personal anecdotes, and statistical research, highlighting the multi-layered journey of "cuck."
• There is a clear chronological trajectory, moving from medieval literature and the original cuckold, through 20th-century sexual practices and technological changes, up to the contemporary internet and political warfare.
• The tone is at once frank, analytical, and darkly humorous, mirroring the complexity and discomfort surrounding sex, masculinity, and taboo in American culture.

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Final Thoughts

Decoder Ring | What the Cuck?! provides a witty, richly-researched examination of how a centuries-old misogynistic trope—once relegated to bawdy jokes and Shakespearean tragedy—became an internet-age touchstone: both a prominent sexual fantasy and a loaded, racially inflected insult at the heart of 21st-century American politics. The story’s twists, from porn searchable terms to presidential campaign trail, reveal how cultural taboos, technology, and power anxieties interact—and how quickly private fantasies can be weaponized in the public sphere. For anyone wanting to understand a bizarre, uncomfortable, and important strand of the current American zeitgeist, this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial Geniuses, Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. You know that feeling when someone truly has your back? Like when a friend shows up to help you move, or a colleague takes the time to recognize your work? It's those shared moments that mean the most. Because staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on. Or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT T guarantee. So what are you waiting for? Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. AT&T connecting Changes Everything before we begin, I want to give you a major heads up. This episode contains adult content 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 Winkie, a staff writer at Slate, was doing some work when he opened up the site formerly known as Twitter.

[Luke Winkie]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Luke Winkie]

Not like the Democratic Party of Maine or California. Not a specific congressman. Just like the Democrats.

[Willa Paskin]

The post contained no text other than tagging Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and longtime Trump advisor.

[Luke Winkie]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

A mid tier business hotel. Beige walls, thin brown carpet, a hanging framed landscape. The most is what's in the foreground.

[Luke Winkie]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. Luke did not scroll right past this chair. He stopped short like if scrolling had tires. His squealed because Luke knew this seemingly unremarkable hotel chair being tweeted by the Democrats at Stephen Miller was not unremarkable at all.

[Luke Winkie]

That is a cuck chair. The platonic ideal of a Cuck chair.

[Willa Paskin]

What's a cuck chair?

[Luke Winkie]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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, widespread online and in the vocabularies of people who spend time there.

[John Herman]

You know what they like to call people today I've known as cuck.

[Luke Winkie]

A cuck.

[Willa Paskin]

C U C K A cuck. I had to look up the word cuckoo. 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.

[John Herman]

Have found a new insult.

[Willa Paskin]

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 could mean something more specific.

[Luke Winkie]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Luke Winkie]

With other men and derives sexual pleasure from the humiliation of that.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Luke Winkie]

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, as this is happening.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Luke Winkie]

Dunking on Stephen Miller by calling him a cuck.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Luke Winkie]

The cuck share is like, that's like, you know, that's some like pornhub stuff front and center. You know.

[Willa Paskin]

This is decoder 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? This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like can we learn to make smarter decisions? And the power of do overs. The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the bestselling book how to Change. In each episode, Katie talks to authors, historians, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones to avoid costly mistakes. Listen and [e-mail] podcast or find it wherever you listen. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Shifting a little money here, a little there, just hoping it all works out well? With the name your price tool from Progressive you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance and they'll help you find options within your budget. Try it [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states. 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 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.

[Samantha Cole]

Let me go to pornhub right now while we're on the phone and hope that it doesn't autoplay anything weird.

[Willa Paskin]

You'll, you'll be forgiven if it does.

[Samantha Cole]

Yeah, we'll have to weep that out.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Samantha Cole]

It's always been really, really basic. It's just a grid mostly on the homepage. 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 a endless scroll of clips of videos.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Samantha Cole]

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

[Willa Paskin]

Are you looking at it right now like, what are, what are the categories?

[Samantha Cole]

So there's ass clapping, ass fucking, ass shaking, ass fuck, ass licking, average ass. You're gonna cut this and it's gonna be the greatest clip that's ever made of me. Deep throat, depraved dick sucking lips, dildo, dirty doggy style, giant tits, 3D. Which apparently there are 2,333 videos available.

[Willa Paskin]

And what about the cucking videos?

[Samantha Cole]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

I don't want to be coy about what's in these videos. We, 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. Or that someone is almost like watching porn, watching a scene, a fantasy, unfold in front of them. Maybe they're sitting in that Doubletree 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 cockled porn increased by 495%. A set of independent researchers found that in the early 2010 10's Cuckold was the second most popular pornographic search term on the English language Internet behind only variations on young so what you have.

[Samantha Cole]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 1000 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 pipit, 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.

[Jennifer Panek]

A cuckold is a man whose wife is sleeping with another man. It's that simple.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Jennifer Panek]

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

[John Herman]

She makes me a cuckold when I am at work.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Jennifer Panek]

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 keep this devious, desire ridden creature in control.

[Willa Paskin]

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 him and is consumed with a murderous rage. Damn her, cuckold me. Oh, tis foul in her. And with mine, officer, that's fouler.

[Jennifer Panek]

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. What was death in cuckoldry? The only things that are inevitable are death and cuckoldry.

[Willa Paskin]

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 wittle?

[Jennifer Panek]

Ah, the whittle. Okay. A wittle is a man whose wife is sleeping with another man and he knows about it and he's perfectly fine with it.

[Willa Paskin]

Standing for a witting cuckold, the wittle is a character who shows up occasionally in Elizabethan era literature. The widdle is not a ridiculous or tragic figure because unlike his counterpart the cuckold, the widdle has decided to live totally stress free.

[Jennifer Panek]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Jennifer Panek]

And so he doesn't have anxiety, he doesn't have jealousy. He's got this sweet deal.

[Willa Paskin]

But even in the case of the wittle, the rewards are purely financial. For both the wittle and the classic cuckold, there is no sexual gratification to be found.

[Jennifer Panek]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 cock porn. A couple centuries later, in the 1870s, Leopold von Sachar Masoch 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 Lalette. 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. You know, those little check ins, like calling your grandmother to say Happy Birthday or texting your friends just to gossip. Feels good, right? It's those shared moments that matter most. Because staying connected matters. That's why in the rare event of a network work outage, AT T will proactively credit you for a full day of service. That's the AT T guarantee. So take a moment to connect. Make the call to your parents you've been putting off. Send a quick message to an old friend and do it all, knowing you've got AT T behind you. Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage. Restrictions and exclusions apply. See att.com guarantee for full details. AT and T connecting changes everything. Some days we celebrate the wins, like calling your best friend to congratulate them on a big promotion or texting your grandmother Happy birthday. Other days we work through the tough stuff like calling a partner to deliver bad news. Whatever the reason for picking up the phone or sending that message, staying connected matters. That's why in the rare event of a network outage, AT and T will proactively credit you for a full day of service. That's the AT and T guarantee. So what are you waiting for? Send that message to someone you miss. Make that call you've been putting off, because those are the moments that matter most. AT and T connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage. Restrictions and exclusions apply. See att.com guarantee for full details.

[David Ley]

Foreign.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[David Ley]

My name is David Lay with last name Lay right I really only had a couple of options. I could be a. A sex doctor or a politician involved in a sex scandal.

[Willa Paskin]

You could lay bricks. You could be a bricklayer.

[David Ley]

That's right. Yeah.

[Willa Paskin]

Okay.

[John Herman]

Ok, that's good. Nice.

[David Ley]

I heard that one before I went, I went the sex doctor route.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[David Ley]

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, you know, enthusiastic permission and support. And I'd never heard about it before. And my initial reaction, to be perfectly honest, was that's crazy.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[David Ley]

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?

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[David Ley]

The American fighter jet community post World War II.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[John Herman]

Many new aces, many empty places.

[David Ley]

Victory.

[Willa Paskin]

Victory.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

Death.

[Willa Paskin]

Victory. Victory.

[David Ley]

These, you know, pilots going Mach 2 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 lives.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[David Ley]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

After the war, these couples moved off air bases 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?

[Justin Lehmiller]

Well, it's a couples movement. Couples that want to be free thinking, free living adult couples.

[Willa Paskin]

They would rather get involved with other people, but together with their spouses. The so called swinging lifestyle dovetailed by 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.

[Jennifer Panek]

Swinging?

[Willa Paskin]

Is that what, what you call it? Yeah. Why 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.

[David Ley]

The swinging community, the lifestyle folks, most of them are republican. Most of them come from more conservative political backgrounds.

[Willa Paskin]

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. Pleasure and the fun will keep you feeling. 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 Bonnie 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 communication, 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.

[Justin Lehmiller]

Usenet has thousands of discussion groups on diverse subjects.

[John Herman]

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

[Willa Paskin]

Bird watching, 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, 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 Cuckold's 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?

[Justin Lehmiller]

I think it is surprising to people.

[Willa Paskin]

Dr. Justin Lemiller 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.

[Justin Lehmiller]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Justin Lehmiller]

Sex therapist Jack Moran 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 yout want, he surveyed 4,175American adults about hundreds of families fantasies, including cucking, which is not niche at all.

[Justin Lehmiller]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

52% to be precise.

[Justin Lehmiller]

It wasn't quite as common among women. You know, women were not as turned on overall by this idea of cuckolding, 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Justin Lehmiller]

Us want to try it out even more.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Justin Lehmiller]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Justin Lehmiller]

Conservative values promote traditional ideas of marriage where you're with one person for the rest of your life, till death do you part. And so conservatives are actually more interested in cuckolding.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Justin Lehmiller]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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 cocktails 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 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. This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to get creative with your personal style and find the best arrivals for fall Transitioning from summer outfits to a fall wardrobe is always a little bit of a hassle and I find [e-mail] helpful. They make it easy and fun to browse the latest fall fashions and find pieces that fit together and that fit me. They have some really great chunky cardigans, some from Polo by Ralph Lauren, that look extremely comfortable and fashionable and I can imagine wearing them all around my house and also out on the town. But that's my experience. With Saks.com there's so much more to explore based on your personal style and what you're looking for. So this fall, whether you're trying out the latest fashion trends or curating a closet that stands the test of time, Saks has you covered. If you're looking for shopping to be fun and easy, then head to Saks Fifth Avenue for inspiring ways to elevate your personal style every day. Emmy Award winner Kerry Washington returns as Dr. Virginia Edwards in Audible's supernatural thriller the Prophecy Season 2. Also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Dulay Hill, Renzi Feliz and Ebony Obsidian. The battle between good and evil reaches new heights in this heart pounding sequel that pushes the fate of humankind to the edge. Follow every twist and turn as Virginia and her miracle son Joshua flee from Detroit pursued by the sinister Luther Bell and his morning stars cult. Every step of their journey is guided by Virginia's haunting visions. While Belle's forces close in as the natural disasters erupt, Virginia must embrace being both mother and chosen protector. But will it be too late? You can find all of this on Audible, which is incredibly easy to use, and I use all the time to play audiobook books in the car. Do not miss Kerry Washington in Audible's new Must Listen the Prophecy Season 2. Go to audible.com prophecy2. That's the number two to start listening today. 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.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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?

[Willa Paskin]

That's when a friend and colleague told her about cucking and that this was.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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

[Willa Paskin]

Mireille 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.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

Means big black cock.

[Willa Paskin]

That is C O, C, K. Like.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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 mandingo, racial epithets that come directly out of slavery and that were used to describe a specific kind of Enslaved person, strong black.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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

[Willa Paskin]

Racialized cucking videos are a subset of a long standing porn genre known as interracial, which features black men. And white 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 Murray says that some interracial cucking videos can be shockingly specific.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 more 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 out explanation for why this happened, but Murray points out that it was part of a larger trend.

[Mireille Miller-Young]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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, 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 Kuck 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.

[John Herman]

At the time, I was a tech 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[John Herman]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[John Herman]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

In 2009, 1011, 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.

[John Herman]

It isn't yet an insult that's in actual use. It's a weird and specific thing to call someone.

[Willa Paskin]

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 a 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.

[David Ley]

President if you're not born in this country. He may not have been born in.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[John Herman]

The Republican field, there was huge fascination with the way that he, like, dominated his opponents. So his character in. In these worlds sort of took off.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[John Herman]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

The Donalds started growing rapidly, and from there, the cuck 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, cuckolded 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 leftist. 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, 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 cuck, servative is a thing, and it sort of sums up what has happened to the Republican party. This is Gavin McGuinness, 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, kowtowing 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 cuckservative movement, that is the problem with the right today.

[John Herman]

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 like forceful and versatile seeming than cuck. But it was the one that broke through.

[Willa Paskin]

This was the moment, now that it was part of this other term, that seemed to speak to the internecine, newsworthy battles within the Republican party. Cuck finally came out of the shadows in July and August of 2015. Cuckservative 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.

[John Herman]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[John Herman]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 world 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.

[Luke Winkie]

Right?

[John Herman]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. A curse word, and ha, 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.

[John Herman]

Getting stuck on that context and by, 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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, 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.

[John Herman]

Foreign.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. There is a lot of material, none of it X rated. I should say that I used 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 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.

[Samantha Cole]

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

[Willa Paskin]

Of sneakily in in the background. To hear more, sign up for Slate Plus. You can do that from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visit slate.comdecoder+ to get access wherever you listen. This episode was written by me. It was edited by Josh Levine. It was produced by Katie shepherd, me, Max Friedman and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob is senior Technical director and we had helped this episode from Sophie Summergrad. I'd like to thank Gabriel Roth, Talia Lavin, Tatum Hunter, Rebecca Fassman, Jessica Stoia, Aidan 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 [e-mail] 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. This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to get creative with your personal style and find the best arrivals for fall Transitioning from summer outfits to a fall wardrobe is always a little bit of a hassle, and I find [e-mail] helpful. They make it easy and fun to browse the latest fall fashions and find pieces that fit together and that fit me. They have some really great chunky cardigans, some from Polo by Ralph Lauren, that look extremely comfortable and fashionable, and I can imagine wearing them all around my house and also out on the town. But that's my experience. With Saks.com there's so much more to explore based on your personal style and what you're looking for. So this fall, whether you're trying out the latest fashion trends or curating closet that stands the test of time, Saks has you covered. If you're looking for shopping to be fun and easy, then head to Saks Fifth Avenue for inspiring ways to elevate your personal style every day. Limu AMU and Doug Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[John Herman]

Cut the camera.

[Willa Paskin]

They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates, excludes Massachusetts.