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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated: What is with the MAGA types that started them using 'cuck' as a catch-all derogatory term? Do any of them realize it's a common sexual fetish which people knowingly and consensually engage in? It's not actually an insult, it's like saying "person who likes bondage".

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Etymologically, cuckhold used to refer to someone being cheated on without their knowledge and consent (and still has that meaning in the dictionary, though its usage is rather archaic now). Using it to refer to the fetish is somewhat more recent. Historically, it has been used as a derogatory term or insult in certain cultures and time periods. So their usage of it isn't exactly unprecedented, though it is odd that it's been latched on to as a generic insult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold

So kind of like hosting files you didn't intend to.

It is leakage from the weird inverted sexual landscape that MRAs and incel swim in - an internet in meme grown too large to contain.

It also serves as a handy handle to insult someone's virility or manliness that fits better in a tweet.

> fits better in a tweet

I wonder how much Twitter influences which new slang catches on. 'Bae' is a convenient three letters. For that matter, 'SJW' and 'MRA' are nice and short. You can get each term into a tweet, twice even, without using up much space.

Start throwing around 8 or 10 letter terms and no one is going to tweet them enough to quickly force them into culture.

Interesting point! Given the tools we have now to analyze corpus, I bet you could track the birth of memes - especially with an eye towards the question you posed.

I shorten lots of terms on irc and elsewhere as well, just because it's faster to type. I doubt this is really a twitter only thing, though of course twitter has a huge influence in spreading these things.

> Do any of them realize it's a common sexual fetish which people knowingly and consensually engage in?

That's precisely the intended meaning, that one literally or figuratively enjoys being taken advantage of.

I've always heard it in more of a political sense. An example for the cuck insult would be, Foo is a cuck because he likes to watch others come over to his house and fuck his wife.

When applied to political situations, Foo's wife would be the US and the others would be illegal immigrants. So Foo is a cuck because he wants illegal immigrants to come over and mess up the US.

And I do believe that many of them are aware that it's a fetish, with many jokes about Foo's wife's boyfriend.

If I recall correctly it was a term popular in other circles (like /r/theredpill on reddit) that make up a lot of the popular online alt-right communities (like /r/the_donald) [1]. The merging of these communities (that generally seem to have hate and/or cynicism as their common thread) resulted in new insults like libcuck (combination of libtard and cuck). It would be fascinating if it wasn't so depressing.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-...

From my experience observing its usage, it can refer to the willful beta-[noun] of any topic. They would call a person a 'cuck' for not taking a lead or position of power, just as easily as they call a country 'cucked' for not being nationalist enough. What remains is promotion of aggressive alpha-everything tendencies.

IMO, it's because it's a term that they can use without getting much kickback. Before, they might use "fag" or whatever, but folks would (rightly) take offense to that. Even folks not directly targeted by those slurs would call out their use. Not as many people are going to go out of their way to defend cuckolds and fight back against the new(ish) slur.

That sounds a little naive. Terms for consensual homosexuality have been used pejoratively for a long time.

It's sort of a linguistic convergence - it began as an in-group term of abuse for those considered not to be hardline enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckservative

when i read it, the implication i got was that the accused gets perverse pleasure from watching corporations defile civil liberties.

like, if he called him a douche, i'd assume it was to say he doesn't care about his obligations to the american people and is only interested in helping his rich buddies... not that the prankster was too lazy to come up with anything other than a gross and generic comparison to female hygiene.

Not so different from the term ass-kisser in that sense.

It's doubly interesting because seemingly all these people who pride themselves on not being cuckolds seem to need rescuing by a reality tv star with bad hair and small hands.

If that's not the definition of being "cucked" I'm not sure what is.

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