You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

“Cuck,” short for “cuckold,” has become the insult of choice in this surreal political season, at least amongst alt-rightists and anime Nazis and other elements of Donald Trump’s political army.

The insult, inspired by a specialized porn genre in which white “hotwives” have sex with black men while their white “cuckold” husbands watch, is intended to suggest not just emasculation but also a kind of racial treason. Or at least that’s what the insult originally meant; at this point it gets thrown at anyone and everyone who stands in the way of the Trump revolution — including women, who by definition can’t be “cucked.”

The people who are most fond of this insult seem to think it has some sort of magical power. In a recent post on the alt-right site The Right Stuff, a guy who calls himself Auschwitz Soccer Ref declares that, in the word “cuck,” he and his comrades had found a sort of right-wing version of “racist,” which he describes as “a powerful, weaponized term” that leftists use to take down, well, racists like him.

The word “cuck” is an “absolutely devastating” insult, he explains.

“Cuck” works for the same reason that “racist” works: it is an irrational word that cannot be deconstructed with reasoning. Just as “racist” hits rightists hard because it attempts to psychopathologize the healthy preference for our own race, “cuck” is devastating to leftists because they are being described as the most humiliating kind of man possible, one who gets aroused by letting another man—or other men—have sex with his wife.

There’s only one problem with Mr. Soccer Ref’s theory: “cuck” isn’t “devastating to leftists,” or indeed to any white dude who isn’t pathologically preoccupied with the specter of black (or Muslim, or Mexican) men having sex with “our” white women. In other words, “cuck” only really stings as an insult to the very people who are tossing the insult around.

And insofar as the related term “cuckservative” actually bothers conservatives, I suspect they are less bothered by the sexual and racial overtones of the term than they are by the implication that they are not bona fide conservatives.

[J]ust like “racism” transcends political terminology like “fascist” and brings morality into the discussion, “cuck” transcends political terminology like “traitor” and brings sexuality and gender into the discussion, thus widening its implications. For years this kind of transcendent, weaponized term was missing from the right’s lexicon, but now it’s here, and that’s why “cuck” is so hurtful to the left and kosher conservatives.

Nope. One of the reasons that “racist” has the bite that it does is because the insult is so often true. What’s strange is that the insult doesn’t just bother garden variety racists; is also bothers alt-rightists and others on the far right whose ideologies are actually rooted in racism. Most racists hate to be labelled as such; that’s why you find so many of them on the far right resorting to euphemism, describing themselves as “race realists” or proponents of “Human Biodiversity” rather than simply admitting that, yes, they are huge bigots.

At-rightists and Trump enthusiasts aren’t the only ones obsessed with cuckolding. Men’s Rights activists are as well, though their definition of “cuckolding” comes not from porn but from one of the term’s original meanings. MRAs worry endlessly about the prospect of their wives (real or hypothetical) cuckolding them by conning them into raising children fathered by another man, presumably some alpha male lover she has on the side.

Indeed, many MRAs and Evo Psych professors have convinced themselves that this old-school variety of cuckolding is exceedingly common, with up to a third of the world’s ostensible fathers unknowingly raising kids who are not theirs.

But a new study published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution suggests that this is nonsense. Using genetic testing and genealogical research, the authors of the study found that the real rate of such cuckoldry has “stayed near constant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years.”

Somehow I doubt that this study will lead MRAs to be any less paranoid about being cuckolded, much less convince the internet’s Anime Nazis to give up an insult they think is “absolutely devastating.”

H/T — Thanks to both readers who alerted me to the new cuckolding study.