“Cuck” And Race
In several previous posts here at ErosBlog, I’ve commented on the puzzling and sudden resurgence of cuckoldry in the American political imagination. What a long strange arc it has enjoyed! First, it was a driving fear in the era when male control over the sexual fidelity of women had greater consequence in the realms of heredity, property rights, money, and status; then it was a slowly-dwindling sexual fetish; and modernly, in its resurgence, it’s primarily a political insult suggesting unmanly weakness.
Now comes Ta-Nehisi Coates with the suggestion that “cuck” as a political insult has a racial component to it:
Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy – the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men.
I am not bold enough to challenge Coates on any matter having to do with race in America; he is a towering intellect whose facts — so far as I have ever been in a position to know — are solid. But this notion that “cuck” denotes a racialized cuckoldry is new to me, and I would very much like to know what Coates’ evidence for it is. But in truth, I can’t think of any way to just ask without becoming that terrible sea lion:
If you told me that Coates had a file folder as thick as my wrist full of racialized “cuck” usages from Bannon and his alt-right trash fire cronies, I wouldn’t bat an eye, anyway. Just because I’ve never seen a thing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Even as I admit to a suspicion that Coates is double-counting offensivenesses here, I’ve got to wonder: have I just done too good a job of keeping alt-right nonsense out of my filter bubble?
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=19331
Might be more like an attempt to *guess* at the right-wing psychology, digging up a possible reason why “cuck” as a political insult came to be…
And now that I see it, it sorta rings true, like “Of course that’s why!” To be fair, though, I’m thinking of how the neo-fascists, post-fascists and crypto-fascists of *my* country tend to think, and projecting that over the American right… so, who knows?
I can see where Coates is coming from, given a lot of the cuckold fetish focuses on white men being cuckolded by black men with very large cocks.
But I agree it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that in a general sense just calling someone a cuck has racial connotations behind it.
Still, coming from Steve Bannon it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
And it even paints this awesome picture in my head that Bannon is so familiar with the fetish because he has it himself. And the reason he acts like such a racist bastard is because he loves seeing his wife being fucked by black men but that conflicts with his religious upbringing and he can’t deal with it psychologically. So he ends up directing his confusion and resulting anger towards all black people.
Somehow that thought makes the world just a little bit of a better place for me.
All you have to do is go on any porn site and google the term, and you will see a much higher incidence of interracial porn than you might otherwise expect.
4chan’s adult boards (like /gif/) feature an outsized amount of black man x white woman in “cuck” threads. I was surprised how often the fetish was racialized, even without explicit requests.
At the least, there’s some link between racism and racial fetishization going on. I find it plausible that interracial sex is one of several concepts in the back of the minds of many political “cuck” users.
It’s because Obama was President, and so many in the USA couldn’t stomach him being in that job. So they called the white men who were happy for him to be there ‘cucks’ because of the connection between power and sex.
Well, here is one article from 2015 and one from 2016 that go into the racial aspects. I have read others that I can’t immediately find.
http://www.salo..._cry/
https://www.gq.com/story/why-angry-white-men-love-calling-people-cucks
SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF TRIPLE HYPHENATED UN-SELF-AWARE
If the most desirable, indeed the “trophy”, female is a Euro blonde, is it possible that the zenith of virility is black?
Mandingo cuckoldry combines the white woman and the black man to create the most transgressive, taboo combination.
The bestselling 1957 novel Mandingo dedicates a small % of its vulgarity to WW/BM sex, but the events were notorious enough to label a genre.
At (possibly apocryphal) Mandingo parties, black men called “bulls” have sex with white women while their husbands watch. The husbands were labeled “cucks.”
Does this usage go back to the late 1950’s?
By fetishizing the black male phallus, white men can sublimate homoerotic fantasies. Because the black man is diminished to a brute or a beast, performing on demand, he remains subservient and sub-human.
If the sexual meeting place were not constrained by culture, would white women prefer black men? Perhaps this atavistic fear lies at the core of KKK and white supremacy.
It’s not true in all cases, but it’s often that for some cuckold fetishists there’s a desire to be humiliated by the new partner – often for being insufficient as a lover, and “insufficiently endowed” in particular. Given the mythology we’ve constructed around the well-hung black man, he would seem an obvious person to play the part of a “bull” who can please the wife when the husband is incapable of it. I think you can even look at it that way with the race almost being incidental.
Of course, there is also the implication that the only thing more humiliating than having a white man fuck your wife with your knowledge is having a black man do it.
That said *I* have to say I find the whole obsession with cuckoldry to be mystifying (among those who don’t ostensibly share the fetish, anyway). I’m poly and have a wife and several girlfriends. I’ve anonymously told guys of this on the Internet this and their initial and only reaction is horror that my wife gets to sleep around too, and that I’ve been “cuckolded.”
And, of course, cuckolds fall for me into those groups like submissive men and dominant women – people I have a lot of respect for because their sexual arousal comes from things they’re not “supposed” to want, but they’re able to overcome society’s opinions and still follow what turns them on. Funny how groups like that which are considered downtrodden and pathetic by vanilla folks I respect so highly for their ability to follow their dreams and desires!
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