Cuckold History

Cuckold History
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Confronted with the hyper-vigilant and often violent jealousy of generations of men protecting their genetic legacy, evolution predicts a psychological arms race between the sexes, producing ever more keen-eyed and suspicious men and ever more creatively deceptive women.
Jun 17, 2013, 05:34 PM EDT | Updated Aug 17, 2013
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"There are likely to have evolved social and psychological biases that increase the prospects that women can successfully deceive cuckolded males into providing paternal investment, and co-evolving male counter strategies." (Daly & Wilson, 1982)
In The Merchant's Tale , by Geoffrey Chaucer, a rich old bachelor, January, decides it's finally time to get married, and settles on an eighteen-year-old girl named May as his ideal wife. Chaucer relishes the details of the wedding night, the physical discrepancy between wrinkled old January: "The slake skin aboute his nekke shaketh" lusting after beautiful young May, who "was broght abedde, as stille as stoon," understandably. The bedroom scenes have all the gleeful mischief of Ricky Gervais roasting Hugh Hefner at the 2011 Golden Globes: "Congratulations to Hugh Hefner who's getting married at the age of 84, to 24-year-old beauty Crystal Harris. When she was asked why she was marrying him, she said 'Because he lied about his age -- he told me he was 94!'" Gervais' advice to Crystal could be helpful for May as well: "Just don't look at it when you touch it" [mimes gagging]. Chaucer is a bit more subtle, though still suggestive, when describing May's reaction to her husband's depredations: "And she obeyeth, be hir lief or looth. / But lest that precious folk be with me wroth, / How that he wroghte I dar nat to yow telle, / Or wheither hir thoughte it paradis or helle."
January's comeuppance soon arrives in the form of a young seducer, Damian, who wins May's heart with a secret love letter, but January is so jealous and watchful that they have to wait months to consummate their attraction. Soon the old man goes blind, which makes him even more jealous, until May concocts an elaborate scheme to meet her would-be lover in the garden, with her husband waiting oblivious and blind nearby. The denouement occurs when May and Damian get caught in flagrante delicto thanks to a stroke of divine intervention.
The gods' intervention takes the form of both a miracle and an origin myth, expanding the story's significance from the narrow world of a single love triangle into the wider world of human nature and the ancient battle of the sexes. To pre-empt the act of adultery, one of the gods gives January a gift, the physical gift of sight because he has gone blind, but also the ability to perceive or recognize the "vileinye" of women in general: "Thanne shal he knowen al hir harlotrye, / Bothe in repreve of hire, and othere mo." And another of the gods gives May and "alle women after" a counter-gift -- empowering them to respond to any accusation with a "suffisant answere." From that day forward, women are blessed with a natural ability to argue, make excuses, and persuade men of their virtue whenever it is questioned: "Yet shal we women visage it hardily, / And wepe, and swere, and chide subtilly, / So that ye men shul been as lewed as gees." The power given to women by the gods is so overwhelming that they can now manipulate and deceive men even in the face of bold evidence: "Al hadde man seyn a thing with bothe his eyen."
This sounds uncannily like an arms race, where two sides of a conflict acquire new weapons perpetually in a cycle of reciprocal one-upmanship. In nature, arms races are produced by natural selection. The female defense has an especially Darwinian quality, in Chaucer's words: "For lakke of answere noon of hem shal dien." It makes me picture a group of women in the Pleistocene, all of them endowed with mammalian sexual desires and occasionally unsatisfying mates, but when confronted by a jealous spear-toting husband, some of them have a ready and clever answer that placates their accuser, while others have none. Which of these women is most likely to be our ancestor?
Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker explains the origins of male sexual jealousy like this:
The human male is unusual among mammals in that he feeds, protects, and cares for his offspring and for their mother. But this investment is genetically risky. If a man's wife has a secret dalliance, he could be investing in another man's child, which is a form of evolutionary suicide. Any genes that incline him to be indifferent to the risk of cuckoldry will lose out over evolutionary time to genes that incline him to be vigilant. As always, genes don't pull the strings of behavior directly; they exert their influence by shaping the emotional repertoire of the brain, in this case, the emotion of sexual jealousy. Men are enraged at the thought of their partner's infidelity, and they take steps to foreclose that possibility. One step is to threaten her and her prospective partners and to enforce the threat when necessary to keep it credible. Another is to control her movements and her ability to use sexual signals to her advantage.
Of course, Pinker concedes that "women as well as men are jealous of their partners, as a biologist would predict from the fact that men invest in their offspring." But the key to the arms race lies in the variable consequences of infidelity, which are fundamentally different for males and females, since it is biologically impossible for a woman to be cuckolded by a man. Since the cost of sexual infidelity is far worse, genetically, for males than females, Pinker continues, "a man's jealousy has been found to be more implacable, violent, and tilted toward sexual (rather than emotional) infidelity. In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms." Pinker has a chosen name for this phenomenon -- this quintessentially male desire to control and restrict female reproductive choice. He calls it an evolved male instinct towards sexual "proprietariness." To make the concept more accessible, I prefer to call it an instinct for "Bush Administration."
Confronted with the hyper-vigilant and often violent jealousy of generations of men protecting their genetic legacy, evolution predicts a psychological arms race between the sexes, producing ever more keen-eyed and suspicious men and ever more creatively deceptive women. This theme of the complementary gifts of the sexes comes up repeatedly in The Canterbury Tales , which is usually explained as a psychological difference bestowed by the gods. Even if Chaucer got the origins wrong, I find it impressive how clearly he saw the nature of the difference.
Baba Brinkman is currently performing off-Broadway in the first-ever hip-hop theatre cycle, " Evolutionary Tales ."
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales . Jill Mann, ed. Penguin Classics, 2005.
Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1982). "Whom are newborn babies said to resemble?" Ethology and Sociobiology , 3, 69-78
Pinker, S. The Better Angels of Our Nature (Kindle Edition). Location 8438. Viking Penguin, 2011

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By Una McIlvenna, University of Melbourne
Posted Tue 19 Dec 2017 at 7:39pm Tuesday 19 Dec 2017 at 7:39pm Tue 19 Dec 2017 at 7:39pm , updated Wed 20 Dec 2017 at 4:52am Wednesday 20 Dec 2017 at 4:52am Wed 20 Dec 2017 at 4:52am
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From the 16th-century to men's rights activists: The history of the insult 'cuckold'
These days the greatest insult a so-called men's rights activist can hurl at another man is the word "cuck", shortened from cuckold, the term for a man whose wife is cheating on him.
The word has entered the mainstream, particularly after Donald Trump's presidential victory saw an alt-right backlash against the achievements of feminism.
But the ideas and language are nothing new; in fact, it was during the Renaissance, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, that Europe had a cultural obsession with cuckoldry.
Back then, it was widely believed that women were more lustful than men, largely because they were subject to the whims of their "wandering womb".
The womb, it was believed, could move independently around a woman's body, causing her to lose control. Thus, if a man were married, his wife was obviously cheating on him.
This infidelity would cause the poor husband to grow invisible horns, the ultimate symbol of cuckoldry, and the comic figure of the horned cuckold made its way into fictional songs, engravings, and theatre. It eventually became so ubiquitous as to give the impression of a "brotherhood of cuckoldry" wherein all wives were adulterous, and all husbands their hapless fools.
In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, a play all about love, marriage, and deception, Benedick jokes about never getting married because it means instant cuckolding:
"The savage bull may; but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull's horns and set them in my forehead, and let me be vilely painted, and in such great letters as they write 'Here is good horse to hire,' let them signify under my sign 'Here you may see Benedick the married man'."
The animal symbolism connected with cuckoldry is complex.
The basis of the word "cuckold" is found in the cuckoo, a bird which lays its eggs in other birds' nests, forcing the unsuspecting bird to raise offspring which are not its own.
The anxieties around paternal lineage due to a cheating wife are obvious in this naming.
Cuckoos, of course, don't have horns.
Countless explanations have been offered for the link between horns and cuckoldry, such as in the 18th-century German print "Hanrey Begrabnusen" ("Cuckolds' Graveyard"), which suggests a whole panoply of horned animals as the bestial source.
The ox — a castrated bull — alludes to the impotence of the wronged husband; while the stag suggests that the cuckolded husband has relinquished his status as a virile sexual pursuer and has become instead his wife's "prey".
The theory that intrigues me, however, is the one of the capon (castrated cockerel).
This refers to the formerly prevalent practice of cutting off the spurs from the legs of a castrated cock and engrafting them on the root of the excised comb, where they could grow and become horns, sometimes several inches long.
Capons, lacking in sexual hormones, grow fat due to their lack of activity and were prized (and still are) for their moist, tender meat.
Their lack of aggression also meant that they could be kept with other hens and roosters. The practice of grafting a spur on their heads served to distinguish them from the other, fully-sexed birds.
This theory certainly fits with the traditional depiction of cuckolded husbands in the early modern period as older, impotent and often overweight men whose wives seek out younger, more virile and more attractive partners, as in many plays by the French writer Molière.
The mockery of cuckolds also links these men to the character of the fool.
In the following 16th-century German woodcut, called On Adultery, a woman places a fools' cap (or Narrenkappe — literally, fool's hood, giving rise to the term "hoodwink") on her husband's ears and rubs his head with a foxtail, another symbol of foolishness.
As well as plays and prints, ballads also mocked the cuckold as a hen-pecked husband who was overly submissive to his wife.
This 17th-century ballad summoned all cuckolds to meet at Cuckolds-Point, an area on the Thames in East London, to repair the footpath that their wives would take with their lovers to Horn-Fair, a carnival-like parade that took place every October:
Here is a Summons for all honest Men,
belonging to the Hen-peck'd Frigate;
And I will tell you the place where and when,
both Gravel and Sand for to dig it;
To mend the ways, 'tis no idle Tale,
At Cuckolds-Point you must meet without fail,
Although this song seeks solidarity in the brotherhood of cuckoldry, others are less kind.
The following French song gossips about a cuckold's torture at the infidelity and sexual voracity of his wife.
They can no longer go to a public place because of his inability to control her, and the shame is so great he eventually commits suicide whereupon she follows him to Hell:
The 16th-century musician Thomas Whythorne claimed that public knowledge of one's cuckolded status doomed a man to social failure:
"for he that is known to be a notorious cuckold cannot be taken upon quests, and is barred of diverse functions and callings of estimation in the commonwealth as a man defamed, so that you may see what a goodly thing it is when a man's honesty and credit doth depend and lie in his wife's tail."
That reference to "his wife's tail" as the (animalistic) thing that decides a man's worth in his community makes it clear for how long men have valued women only in sexual terms.
And it also shows that men have been ridiculing each other in terms of sexual inadequacy for a very long time.
Una McIlvenna is Hansen lecturer in history at the University of Melbourne.
Originally published in The Conversation
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The type of consensual non-monogamy, explained.
"Cuckolding" is one of those sex terms that you've probably seen pop up somewhere on the internet (hello, porn sites), but you might never have known what it actually means. As the world becomes more woke to all kinds of monogamy, polyamory, and everything in between, people are becoming more and more open about enjoying cuckolding in the bedroom . So, here's everything you need to know.
Cuckolding is essentially a form of consensual non-monogamy , where one partner watches their lover having sex with another person. Often, cuckolding involves the observing partner (known as the cuckold) being present in the room while they watch, but they could also observe by being sent messages or photos of what is happening.
Cuckolding differs from other forms of consensual non-monogamy (CNM) as it's all focused on watching what's happening. Other kinds of CNM include polyamory , where someone has multiple romantic partners, but cuckolding is usually purely sexual rather than romantic. Another kind of CNM is swinging , where couples swap sexual partners, but when it comes to cuckolding, the person observing usually doesn't physically participate in any sexual activity.
The word "cuckold" is derived from the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in other birds' nests, meaning that the birds go on to raise chicks that aren't their own. "Cuckold" was first used in medieval times to describe the husband of an unfaithful wife who, unaware of his wife's infidelity, would raise children that clearly weren't his own, like with cuckoo birds.
The modern-day usage of the word "cuckolding" as a fetish differs from its origins, as the cuckold is aware of and is consenting to their partner sleeping with another person.
While the origins of the term describe cuckolding as a husband watching his wife with another man, cuckolding can be done any way you want, whether it's a female partner watching their male partner with another woman or another man, or whether everybody involved is male or female or of any other gender.
There are various reasons why people might enjoy cuckolding as a fetish or a form of consensual non-monogamy. Some people introduce cuckolding as a way of combatting boredom or repetition in a relationship, and find that sexual variety actually strengthens their relationship with their partner, especially as they're able to learn more about what their partner enjoys. For others, the jealousy they feel from watching their partner with another person adds an exciting element to their relationship and can add a new dimension to their sex life.
"Cuckolding may trigger sexual jealousy," says psychosexual and relationship therapist Aoife Drury . "The thought of their [the cuckold's] partner being with someone else may be quite arousing."
Aoife adds that another reason cuckolding can be enjoyable is because "it's about seeing sexual satisfaction or empowerment from your partner and that being a turn on. This actually has a name and is defined as com
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