For the last several years, to be a cuck has had little to do with your sexual proclivities or those of your partner. It has instead been a sort of energy: Being cucked is about being spiritually and philosophically submissive, resigning your values to some dominating ideological or cultural force, and telling yourself you like it. The threat of being cucked no longer comes down to whether your wife would cheat on you—now, the risk of anyone being cucked is near-constant. And as these recent weeks have made clear, we can’t get that idea off our minds.
Last week, the cuck conversation took two forms. The first was through a viral illustration of a line of naked men all waiting to have sex with a single woman. Among all these naked men is one man in a suit, holding a bouquet of flowers. It circulated via a masculinity and dating-centric Twitter account with over 200,000 followers called “The Man Maker,” who shared the image saying, “Ignoring her past will ruin your future.” Just two days later, the account posted it again, edited so that the line appears to extend into infinity, the woman at the end no longer even visible. “You can’t keep a woman who belongs to the streets,” the caption said. “I didn’t make these rules, nature did.”
Videos by VICE
The tweets amassed millions of views, with hundreds of men responding with “100” emojis and earnest retweets. “Once a prostitute, always a prostitute,” one wrote. It also generated plenty of mocking responses that went viral on their own. But even amid all those dunking on the post, for a significant population of men, this image does represent a deep fear: not only being the chump in the suit but being recognized among their peers as such.
At the same time, photos emerged of Jeff Bezos and his now-fiancé Lauren Sánchez hanging out with her ex-boyfriend, former NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez. There are pictures of the trio on Bezos’ yacht, with Gonzalez notably buff and shirtless, as well as some of the gang all walking down the street together—the suggestion being that Bezos shouldn’t tolerate hanging out with a man that fathered a child with his fiancé, particularly so soon after their engagement. It had to mean one of two things: for all his excessive wealth, Bezos cannot enforce boundaries with women and position himself as some “alpha”—or Gonzalez and Sánchez must be sleeping together, and Bezos must actually enjoy it. Either way, Bezos is a cuck—literally or emotionally.
In all likelihood, the three adults are probably attempting to foster some sort of blended family dynamic among all their children, or maybe Bezos doesn’t have many friends. Still, the mere image of them all together has brought the cuck theory to life, even when it doesn’t quite make sense. After all, Gonzalez and Sánchez had been separated for several years before Bezos came into the picture. Sánchez was married to an entirely different man when she and Bezos began seeing each other. If anyone was cucked in this dynamic, it was probably Sánchez’s ex-husband. But none of this matters because we know something about Bezos: no matter how much money he has, no matter how ripped he gets, and no matter how hot his new partner is, he will still evoke this image in our minds of a balding tech dork. For many, he will always embody the ethos of spiritual cuckoldry.
Cuckoldry has been the topic of insults and humor since at least Shakespearean times, but in less than a decade, its meaning has fluctuated repeatedly to this odd place it’s in now. When Trump-adjacent conservatives began using the term around 2015, the public acted scandalized. Buzzfeed News called it racist; the Southern Poverty Law Center published a blog explaining the meaning of the “cuckservative” meme. Meanwhile, at VICE, actual cuckold fetishists spoke out angrily about their niche being used as a right-wing dig. All this now feels dated, at best. We’re well beyond the phase of needing it either explained or defended. If anything, actual cucks have become relatively normalized: It’s common now for men whose wives or girlfriends have other partners to post publicly about the dynamic on social media, even if they are often met with some ridicule. Now, with “cuck” being both politically and sexually neutered, it’s come to mean everything and nothing.
We can say whatever we want to make ourselves feel superior to a man like Bezos, but that does not change the reality that he is one of the wealthiest people to ever live in a way that none of us will remotely compare. Whether Bezos’s fiancé sleeps with other men doesn’t change that. Meanwhile, images like the cuck line highlight the gaping insecurity men still feel about being put in such a category, whether getting labeled as a literal cuck or a spiritual one. Even if we’ve lost much of a definition of the word, it continues to dominate us. The frequency of the cuck conversation borders on obsession. Whether it be Bezos or this fantasy of comparing women to used cars, cucking has invaded our brains. And isn’t that a type of being cucked, in itself?
