Cuckold
A cuckold (sometimes spelled cuckhold) is a married man whose wife has sex with other men. In current usage it sometimes refers to non-married couples in committed relationships as well, although the traditional meaning is a man whose wife is adulterous.
There are connotations of helplessness and humiliation attributed to the word: implications that the husband lacks the strength to enforce marital fidelity traditionally accorded to a husband as head of his household. He is too weak, too stupid, or henpecked to leave or divorce her. Although historically it was a term in general use, nowadays it is much more frequently associated with female domination, power exchange, sexual humiliation, erotic sexual denial or sexual fantasy based on those themes.
History of the term
"Cuckold" is derived from the Old French for the Cuckoo bird, "Cocu" with the pejorative suffix -ald. The earliest written use of the Middle English derivation, “cokewold" occurs in 1250. The females of certain varieties of Cuckoo lay their eggs in other bird’s nests, freeing themselves from the need to nurture the eggs to hatching. In mediaeval Europe, the law, custom, and the church all defined married women as a category of property held by her husband. Although Christian marriage vows strictly enjoined sexual exclusivity in a marriage for both partners, custom and doctrine rarely enforced it on the husband. A married woman who was unfaithful to her vows made a “cuckoo" of the husband who unknowingly provided her, and potentially her illegitimate offspring, with shelter and protection as a tricked bird does to the cuckoo’s eggs.
A nuance of the word often overlooked in contemporary usage is that it refers to a man who, like the bird warming the cuckoo’s eggs, is unaware of his victimization. A man who knows and acquiesced, in his wife’s taking of another lover was called a “wittol," itself a derivation from the Middle English for “willing (as in knowing) cuckold."
A currently popular slang extension of the definition of cuckold expands it from married men to any male in domestic relationship with a woman in which he remains exclusive and she does not. This new usage may also reflect the paucity of established words that describe the variety of alternative sexual and romantic arrangements that have proliferated in recent years.
Cuckolds have sometimes been written as "wearing the horns of a cuckold" or just "wearing the horns". This refers to a tradition claiming that in villages of unknown European location, the community would gather to collectively humiliate a man whose wife gives birth to a child recognizably not his own. According to this legend, a parade was held in which the hapless husband is forced to wear antlers on his head as a symbol of his wife’s infidelity. Whether this did actually happen or not is irrelevant to the phrase, which survived.
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