08-05-2016, 02:25 PM
The problematic history of the alt-right’s favorite new insult.
Quote:If you’ve been on Twitter in the last few months, chances are you’ve come across “cuck,” a word that you’d previously only seen while your browser was in Incognito Mode.
Its literal meaning references a submissive man sexually cuckolded by a woman. Now, it is a catch-all among the alt-right, in the dark corners of the internet where #feminismisacancer hashtags are a badge of pride and the real enemy is PC culture, where “cuck” has become shorthand for any perceived weakness, or rather, perceived reluctance to exploit strength.
Although “cuckold” has been used since the thirteenth century (the word itself derived from cuckoo birds, which lay eggs in another’s nest), “cuck” was added to Urban Dictionary in 2007. Any more exact tracing of its origins is lost in the dense knot of the internet and the speed with which its population seized upon an insult to emasculate others.
The word gained political potency during the 2016 election in the portmanteau “cuckservative” (cuck + conservative) used to imply that the mainstream conservatives of the Jeb Bush variety are weak and effeminate. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is not a cuckservative. He says what he wants and doesn’t care if it’s offensive. In reference to Trump’s comments about Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever,” radio host Rush Limbaugh snarked, “If Trump were your average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican, he would have apologized by now.”
But Donald Trump doesn’t apologize. He went on to win the Republican presidential nomination as Jeb Bush, the one-time favorite, was irrevocably set back by a simple insult from Trump delivered with an invisible wink: “low-energy.”
Since The Donald bested the field of cuckservatives with his manly virility and full head of hair, those who couldn’t see a good insult go to waste have continued to use it in its shortened form—cuck—which applies first to anyone supporting Hillary, but also anyone who would challenge Donald Trump on his spelling, his logic, or his facts.
So now that a word previously only used for pornography or in 4chan has achieved mainstream political significance, it’s time to ask the question: Why has the word “cuck” resonated with so many angry white men?
An insult is, by nature, telling of its source: you never insult with something that you don’t think is insulting. A woman would never sneer that another woman is fat if she herself would be comfortable with her body at any size, if “fatness” weren’t something she feared. A man mocking the size of another man’s genitals broadcasts his own belief that the length of one’s penis is something to be either proud or embarrassed about.
The cultural importance of the cuckold in America is rooted in racism: in pornography, the wife of the cuckolded (almost exclusively white) husband is most commonly sleeping with African-American men, meant to provide an additional layer of humiliation if the white husband sees that man as “inferior.” In the world of pornography meant to elicit humiliation as an erotic sentiment, cuckold porn takes advantage of its viewers’ racist perceptions.
After the Civil War, the white supremacist movement radicalized its supporters with the fear of black men raping white women. Even Shakespeare evoked the sexual element of racial angst: in Othello, Iago attempts to pit Desdemona’s father against his Moorish son-in-law by evoking very specific imagery: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.”
In 2016, the word “cuck” resonates with white nationalists who feel as though their country has been taken away from them, and not enough had been done by the cuckservative establishment conservative party to protect it. “Cuck” is a concept borne out of insecurity: a fear that one is inadequate, sexually or otherwise, and that inadequacy will lead to the loss of the things that are important to him.
And it’s becoming increasingly obvious: these men have lost. They have watched the first black president elected into office twice become a positive symbol for the progress and promise of our nation, both domestically and overseas; they have watched women join the workplace and become empowered enough to speak out at the injustices they face. They have watched as a “politically correct culture run amok” has made it socially unacceptable to be racist in public.
But here is Donald Trump who says what he thinks no matter how many people call it sexist or racist, who promises to build a giant wall to keep non-white people out of the country, who makes being in charge seem easy. Trump doesn’t require a nuanced understanding of politics or statistics or complex trade agreements. He will say whatever he’s thinking. And in this election, he’s also appealing to a base instinct, something hardwired after generations of pernicious cultural feedback: a confident man knows better than a woman.
Because after all, what is being cuckolded but humiliation at the hands of a woman? The cuckolded man is at the mercy of a woman to choose to be with him or to be with someone else; she chooses the other as a punishment for his sexual inadequacy. If one’s insults represent their own fears, those who call others a cuck do so in the desperate hope that shreds of their own masculine and racial prominence can be protected.
When their party’s political candidate can retweet images from neo-Nazi websites and call the Jewish head of the DNC “highly neurotic” without reproach, when he can quite literally launch his political career by accusing our nation’s first black president of being born in Africa, when he can rank women on a scale of 10, call them fat pigs, say you need to “treat them like shit,” and still not take a hit in the polls, the angry white men who use the word “cuck” can exhale, safe in the understanding that, even if only for a few more years, their views are still shared by millions of other Americans. They will go on calling others “cucks,” pretending they’re not afraid of their own impotence.