Cuck

If you’ve been online any time in the past year (or if you have your butler print out Reddit every morning so you can read it over coffee) you have probably seen someone call someone else a “cuck.” Cuck has joined (though unfortunately not replaced) words like “fag” and “tard,” in the ever-classier lexicon of the alt-right. Rather than referring to an unchangeable aspect of identity like these other words, however, “cuck” attempts to shame its target by impugning a supposed cornerstone of his masculinity: his ability to not have his wife fucked by other men.

Cuck is actually a contraction of a much older epithet: cuckold. It is derived from the Old French cucu, meaning the cuckoo bird, notorious for laying its eggs in other birds’ nests. Weirdly, it doesn’t refer to the adulterer – who would properly be called a cuckolder – but rather to the “victim” of adultery. A cuckold is always male. If a woman’s partner is sleeping around, she can be called a cuckquean, but the term is much less common. This is probably because (among other reasons) one implicit threat of cuckoldry is being fooled into unwittingly raising another man’s offspring. A woman, for some fairly obvious reasons, would be much harder to fool in this way.

Cuckolds have been the subject of derision for centuries, and this scorn has largely gone unexamined. But it’s 2018. A toilet is president and the atmosphere is on fire. I say we re-examine our aversion to cuckhood. I say we take it as a compliment.

While cuck is originally derived from cuckold, a quick look at urban dictionary shows that it now signifies far more. A cuck is “spineless,” “a little bitch,” someone “who holds leftist views, politically speaking.” All of this, bound up in whether or not a guy’s wife is fucking other people. Seems a bit narrow-minded. What about ethical polyamory? What about guys with stepchildren, or adopted children? What about people who are just super into watching their wives fuck other dudes? Are we so strapped for measures of character that it really all comes down to whether you can build a wall around a pussy?

But if you’re reading this, I doubt I need to convince you that cuck is a silly insult. You may still be skeptical, however, that it’s a compliment. To the skeptics among you, I offer one compelling data point:

King Arthur was a cuck.

Yes, the single greatest king of all time, the dude other British monarchs were consciously emulating for centuries. That dude was the cuckiest cuck who ever cucked. His BEST FRIEND fucked his wife, the QUEEN, over and over again for YEARS and he did nothing until he was absolutely forced to. Why? Because he was spineless? Was the guy who brought law to Britain, founded the Round Table, and pulled a sword out of a god damn stone a little bitch? No. King Arthur let Lancelot fuck his wife for the good of the kingdom.

Not only is Lancelot King Arthur’s best bro, he’s also the greatest knight in the world, and a key source of Arthur’s mandate. You may recall that when Arthur finally is forced to punish Lancelot (due to the machinations of his failson Mordred), it leads inevitably to the end of the Round Table. Now, I’m a way shittier dude than King Arthur, but I want to believe that if I had to choose between sacrificing everything I ever worked for and letting another dude fuck my wife, I’d pick option B.

That’s what a cuck really is, my friends: a dude who realizes that some things are more important than not having your wife fucked. I know most cucks aren’t the once and future king of all of England, but even on a more mundane level – is a guy who sticks around to raise the kids some other fuckboy fathered really the guy we want to be mocking?

Plus, cuckolds get sweet horns! Unsatisfied with jamming just one animal metaphor into their euphemism for adultery, medieval europeans took to saying that dudes who got cheated on “wore the horns of a cuckold.” Apparently they said this because stags give up their mates when other stags out-horn them. In fact, in Italy and some other places, it’s still considered insulting to throw the horns. Yes, the same horns you throw at a fucking metal concert. Cuck on, dudes. Like, does anyone actually believe that having horns would be anything other than awesome? I don’t care how stubby the horns are. People don’t have horns. Any amount of horn on a person is a bonus. If being a cuck means I can headbutt my way through a car window, someone please fuck my wife.

Look, I’m not saying getting cheated on isn’t shitty. That kind of betrayal is always going to suck. But the bad guy in that shitty situation isn’t the person who’s being cheated on. It’s the people doing the cheating. If we all strive to be as kind and understanding as King Arthur in the face of that shittiness, maybe we, too, will some day deserve to call ourselves cucks.