“Questionable Cuck-Talk”
My post ten days ago about Ta-Nehisi Coates and and how I thought he might have gotten out a few inches ahead of his skis with his assertion in The Atlantic that cuckoldry has become a racialized insult drew thoughtful commentary and linkage, for which I thank you all. (The one “nothing wrong with sea-lioning” guy went straight to the bit bucket.)
However, yesterday I noted with amusement that Coates’ essay drew a lengthy-to-the-point-of-tedium point-by-point critique from the Marxist left in Counterpunch, where his stuff is deemed “brilliant bourgeois bullshit” in the headline. So, you know, consider the source. Under the delicious sub-head “More Over-Reach: Questionable Cuck-Talk”, author Paul Street (who must have been running low on purely Marxist critiques) bluntly writes:
There’s nothing about race in any known definition of the word cuckold. Maybe there ought to be but there isn’t.
Street, of course, is right as far as he goes. But as the commentary on my last post makes clear, words are defined not only by reference to stodgy dictionaries, but also by their actual use within a social context. And I’m not quite so big a fool that I would declare Coates wrong on this, sawing madly at the limb behind me; all I’m willing to do is to say that if he’s right, he’s got access to contextual material that I do not. (Which would be no surprise at all.)
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I just did a quick count for a “cuck” search on eroprofile.com. Of the first fifty videos found 7 of 50 were unknown or same race and 43 out of 50 were black men on white wives. Seems pretty clear to me there is a racial component to the use of the word, overlaid by the traditional meaning of cuckold.
Many use the term “bull” where there is a definite link to “hung like a bull” but also various allusions to breeding or being bred by a bull as in animal breeding.
Are we surprised that race, with its strong emotional content (at least for some) would be a component of those people’s sexuality?
The funny thing about this though is that the majority of the videos are purported to be shot by the cuckolded husband who has no negative feelings at all about being a cuck, and in fact seems to be the one soliciting and enabling the encounter – ie for the actual cucks, it is does not appear to be an insult.
The insult then has to be to imply someone has the “bent” ie derives some satisfaction from seeing a well hung black man pleasuring his wife, rather than the traditional stigma of cuckoldry where someone’s wive is actually cheating on him with another man due to his inability to satisfy her (or control) her himself.
I don’t think that’s what those using the term want to mean though – To my mind it is not well thought out.
Remember that the people using this sense of ‘cuck’ as an insult also believe it’s contemptible to not be an ‘alpha male.’ If a man is ever not totally in control of sex, even if it’s by choice, he’s a loser.
As the Oxford English Dictionary does not use a quotation for cuckold after 1845 I think we can’t rely on it for current cultural context.