2 weeks Ago
In the "manosphere," an online world of angry young men, those who have been "red-pilled," in a nod to the film The Matrix, have purportedly been awakened to the truth about gender and sexual politics. At its core is the notion that men do not actually have systemic privilege; they are instead at the whims of women, who will take advantage of them unless they assert their dominance. In their worldview, the "cuck" is a disenfranchised victim of hyperfeminist power.
For evolutionary biologists, the term cuckoldry originated to describe cuckoo birds who lay their eggs in other species' nests, leaving their offspring to be unknowingly raised by foster parents. In humans, it's been more broadly used to describe the husbands of unfaithful wives: such husbands have been said to have been "cuckolded." More recently, however, both the manosphere and the alt-right have adopted the term cuck as a more general synonym for weakness, desperation and foolishness.
The resurgence of such wording—previously popular in Renaissance and Shakespearian literature—has been fostered by research within evolutionary psychology, which has proven to be a treasure trove of inspiration for the most insidious interpretations of women's behavior. Evolutionary psychologists have typically emphasized two core features of cuckoldry: that men are being tricked by women into raising nonbiological children and that the care they provide for those children is "wasted" effort. Both features have resonated within the manosphere as they depict women as amoral, promiscuous, and untrustworthy and infer that men are the victims of female cunning.
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.. Brooke Scelza.
