Cuckold
A cuckold is a person, usually a man, with a sexually unfaithful partner, typically the man's wife. There are connotations of helplessness and humiliation attributed to the word: implications that the husband is helpless to stop her infidelity, and too cowardly to leave the wife.
History of the term
"Cuckold" appears in older texts as a highly insulting and pejorative term.
Cuckolds are sometimes written of as "wearing the horns of a cuckold" or just "wearing the horns". This goes back to an unsubstantiated reference to a tradition in villages of unknown European location where the community gathers to collectively humiliate a man whose wife gives birth to a child recognizably not his own. This is said to have been a parade where the hapless husband is forced to wear antlers on his head as a symbol of his wife’s infidelity. Whether this actually happened or not is irrelevant to the phrase, which survived.
The history of the word is thought to be related to the Cuckoo bird, who is known to put its eggs in another bird's nest. Some think that this points to another hallmark of the cuckold—the raising of a child that is not his own.
Cultural usage
In Italy and Spain, "horns" are a metaphor for suffering the infidelity of a partner, not limited to husbands in modern usage. However, the use of the term dates from the Roman empire, since legionaries returning from the war were given horns as a triumph or prize. So, the use of the term is a mockery of the husband, victorious in the battlefield, but defeated in his own bed. The gesture of the horned hand can be used to insult the cuckold; the Italian translation, cornuto literally means horned (This sometimes causes confusion in Italians who are learning English and encounter the word horny). The Spanish word for a consenting cuckold, cabrón, has such an offensive nuance that it is a taboo word rarely used with its original meaning, "he-goat". However, according to the tone and the relation to the addressed, it can be even laudatory.
The Chinese term for "cuckold" translates as "wearing a green hat".
Recent usage
The term has made a resurgence in the late 20th century amongst couples with a dominant female allowed to take on additional partners, and a submissive male is either monogamous to her or denied sex altogether, aside from performing oral sex. Some dominant women have their male partner watch them have sex with others, but the more common practice is for the domme to go out on dates, while her sub or slave stays at home. Some dominants have their sub or slave perform oral sex on them after they have had sex with another man. In some cases, the dominant woman's sex partner may be submissive to her, while other times, she simply engages in vanilla sex with him.
Most female-dominant couples who practice cuckolding tend to be in their thirties or older. It is common for the dominant woman to take on younger men when cuckolding her primary partner. In these cases, the younger partner is a mere "boytoy," and there is no possibility of a serious relationship developing.
It should also be noted that a common form of cuckolding is the "interracial-cuckold." This almost always involves a white couple and a black male. The premise of this cuckold is that black males are sexually superior to their white counterparts. They are stronger, have more stamina and larger genetalia than the white husband. Because of this the white wife might deny her husband in the bedroom, forcing him to watch her copulate with the dominant "black bull", often relegated to simple masturbation. In part, the cuckold is seen as "retribution" or "vengence" for the treatment of the black man by the white historically. The "revenge" is that the white man's greatest "prize", the white woman, now prefers the more sexually potent black man. Ironically this "revenge" is based in stereotypes.
Cuckolding among female-dominant couples differs from the original definition of cuckolding in that many of these men are voluntarily "cuckolded" by their wives, as part of the husband's sexual fantasy of gaining sexual pleasure from being humiliated by his wife—indeed, the husband may even be the instigator of this practice, raising questions about who is truly the dominant and who the truly submissive partner. This is a common theme in letters to pornographic magazines. It is unclear how common this phenomenon is in real life as opposed to fantasy. In the fantasy realm, the wife of a cuckold is sometimes referred to as a hotwife. In a broader context, the contrast between a cuckold and bull is sometimes used to summarize an individual's personality or behavior; the bull representing an agressive alpha male and the cuckold suggesting weakness, fear and vulnerability.