Pulp Cover Cuckold

There have been several posts here at ErosBlog exploring the curious recent rise of cuckolding insults on the US political right, as well as the related question of whether “cuck” in its modern usage (or cuckold fears and fantasies generally and historically) is necessarily a racialized concept. It’s become clear to me that there’s a greater racial component than I realized at first, which is probably because my first exposures to notions of cuckoldry came from Victorian porn. Another data point, if you are of a mind to consider Italian pulp cover art as sociological data:

From the cover of Pussycat Gigante #1.

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“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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“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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Spot The “Cuck”

If, like me, you’ve been puzzled by the rise of “cuck” as a sort of all-purpose insult among the American alt-right, you might have been focusing too closely on its sexual connotations, and especially on its origins in the word “cuckold”. This could be an especially easy mistake to make if your exposure to cuckoldry has primarily been to cuckoldry-as-a-porn-genre. When a political partisan cries “cuck!” in 2017, it’s an entirely different insult he’s making. He’s making an insult about power, which may be the source of your confusion.

Let’s put this in terms that might be easier to understand. There’s an old saying among poker players. At every poker table, there’s a chump. When you sit down, look around. If you can’t spot the chump, the chump might be you.

What does this have to do with cucks? Well, let’s listen to Jessica Crispin explaining Why They Need The Cucks at The Baffler:

In the mythology of 4chan, there are many different kinds of men: the snobby alpha males and the wronged beta males, for starters, and then a thousand variations from there. Cucks are considered the worst of the lot: soft, overripe men who have lost their power and control, like failed presidential candidate Jeb Bush or any man who shows an interest in feminism.

That the word “cuckold,” fusty and ringing of Shakespeare, was first brought back into popular discourse via a category of pornographic fetish videos is less important than you would think. Those videos won’t teach us anything we don’t already know.

…

The categories of embattled manhood now trafficked by the cuck-trashing, immigrant-bashing men of Breitbart or 4chan are shifting but ultimately exacting; they obsess over finer and finer distinctions. Their aim is not to elevate one idealized version of masculinity, but to break masculinity into a more perfect pecking order, so almost everyone can look down a level at the scum below. This new order relies on the traditional markers of manly achievement — a girlfriend, sexual partners, money, power, and, most importantly, control — but none of those matter as much as the act of division itself. It’s a coping strategy. Yes, the 4chan men like to make jokes about living in their parents’ basements, but those jokes are only funny if they can point to someone even lower than themselves.

Here, then, is the task of the twenty-first-century American man: making hierarchies that don’t put him at the bottom. The bottom is where the cucks are — because “cuck,” in its current incarnation, is an insult aimed not at men who are betrayed by women (or even men who are betrayed by women and really, really like it), but at men who don’t have anyone to control.

That’s it, then. Can you spot the cuck at the table? No? Then the cuck might be you — especially if you don’t have anybody to control. Darn!

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