Truth or truthiness: cuckservative edition
I didn’t know that cuckservative was a new right-wing meme; used by Rush & friends. Is this really a thing? (Link should probably have a trigger warning, it’s cruel.)
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Roland Dodds talked about it in a recent post. The phrase has really quickly become pretty toxic (to the speaker) in conservative circles. Even among those quick to throw out the RINO term (which itself is losing currency, though isn’t going away).Report
Wait…what? From interracial pornography? Do they not know that the word “cuckold” dates back centuries and is not race-specific?Report
The word cuckold has been around for centuries but it previously involved a man who was either unaware with his wife’s cheating or aware of it but not fine with it. It wasn’t a sex fetish term like BDSM. As I understand, and find suboptimal for reasons expressed bellow, the cuckold fetish involves men who are watching their wives have sex with another man. Most of the explicit material I’ve seen involves three white people as much as it does two white people and an African-American so the actual cuckold fetish might not have a racial basis, I’m also assuming the professional versions don’t involve any actual married participants, but I can see how a racial element does come into play considering human history.Report
No doubt. Race relations are weird, and people have all sorts of unconscious biases. There are worse ways to deal with them than sex.
I mean, if you’re a racist well….you should fix that. But if you’re going to express it to other people, I think I’d prefer you and your wife having affairs with black men rather than burning crosses.
Although human nature being what it is, you’d probably just do both. Not simultaneously.Report
Yeah. I too am skeptical of the race angle, at least of the idea this is centrally race. After all, the threat of cuckolding has long been a preoccupation of the redpill crowd, and thus a preoccupation of the neoreactionary crowd, and so I’m not at all surprised to see it catch on with the general angry white guy crowd.
Which, whatever. That whole zeitgeist is filled with the most obvious jackasses. Pretty much everyone else sees how ridiculous they are.
I’m so glad I’m a liberal.Report
Read the sites the first championed the term, or the comments on conservative sites that disparage it. For instance, the comments to the Daily Caller piece CK linked immediately go to calling its author a traitor because he’s a Jew. (Which seems, by the way, to be false.) It’s very much about race.Report
@mike-schilling — I’m sure that is true, but I wonder if the larger share of people repeating the term really are thinking that way. However the term emerged, the people using it now are using it because they heard some other person say it. That other person might not have been openly racist. Thus it spreads despite its origin. My suggestion is the term has found fertile ground among a certain segment of angry white dudes, already being influenced by the redpill nonsense.
None of which means they are not racist. I’m sure many of them are.Report
@veronica-d
By that logic, suburban white kids who only hear the n-word used by rappers would have a free pass to use it. And yet they don’t. Because we recognize that things like context and word origin matter.Report
@kazzy — The thing is, my comments have nothing to do with giving the hard right cover for being racist jackasses. Instead, it is to try to understand the full contours of this thing.
What I mean is, I’m all for calling people racist when they do racist things, but saying “nyah, nyah, you’re a racist” perhaps misses some other important things. It lets us settle on one level of badness without digging deeper to find the chthonian strata of badness beneath. (I should probably feel embarrassed by that metaphor.)
But anyway, it is this, the “manosphere” types have long been obsessed with the problem of “cuckolding,” which in their minds has to do with women fucking “alpha males,” getting pregnant, and then convincing some hapless “beta male” to raise the “other guy’s kid.”
Which, being adopted, I find this whole belief system rather grotesque. But never mind that.
Sometimes this is overtly racist. I have no doubt there is a constant undercurrent of racism in any redpill-esque discourse. Those men are literally some of the worst shitheads in the contemporary United States. But often enough the conversation is not overtly racist, and even the merely sexist aspects of this are horrible and worth talking about.
I suspect it was this sexist belief as much as the racist belief that provided fertile ground for this meme to spread.
In a related note, this from The Political Omnivore’s writeup of the debates, where he talks about Trump’s little spat with Megan Kelly:
I think he is correct. This crowd is lousy with racism. No doubt. But they are just as lousy with sexism. Don’t set that aside. It is enough to understand the attraction of this meme.
White kids should probably avoid using the n-word.Report
But often enough the conversation is not overtly racist, and even the merely sexist aspects of this are horrible and worth talking about.
This. A thousand times this.
Like I said above, strip out *any* aspect of race at all, and it’s still a pretty horrible and sexist analogy. It paints American as a women who is ‘owned’ by conservatives, but, so the analogy claims, some conservatives get aroused watching the country have sex with liberals.
Or something vaguely like that. It’s *all sorts* of crazy sexist, so much so it’s hard to dissect.
Politics is a game of who gets to have sex with the country? Wha?
The country (which is a woman) isn’t freely able to choose who she has sex with, and is somehow tied to conservatives because…they want her badly? (I mean, I don’t recall any sort of marriage…are we sure that conservatives are just *stalking* this poor woman and invented a fantasy in their mind?)
Conservative politicians fight their way into power merely so they can *submit* to liberals running in and taking ‘their woman’? Because they have some sort of…political fetish? (Seriously, there’s a lot of bad things I’ll say, and have said, about conservative pols over the years, but, really?)
I mean, I understand it’s an analogy, but it’s a *batshit crazy* one with all sorts of very odd and sexist implications.Report
@veronica-d, I’m a liberal to. Not wanting your partner to cheat on you is a fundamental fear rather than a reactionary or conservative one. Most liberals aren’t polyamorist in inclination and are not fine with open relationships. I’m one of them. There might be more baggage with the fear of cheating in conservative or reactionary circles but the fear is universal. Even open relationships can go to hell if the seeing other people is done in the wrong way.Report
@leeesq — Pretty much no one wants their partner to cheat on them, outside of some pretty messed up relationships heading for failure. In fact, poly people don’t want their partners to cheat on them. (They just have a different sense of what “cheating” is.)
When I talk about the redpill preoccupation with cuckolding, it’s a very different thing, wrapped up in all manner of hatred against women. In their discourse, it is specifically something women do to men, quite deliberately, in order to trick “betas” into raising the children of “alphas.” It’s a really messed up stew of patriarchal nonsense.
So of course it is popular with the neo-reaction crowd. And so of course it has spread to the broader right wing.
None of which suggests that cheating is okay. It is not. Cheating sucks. This is not about that.
(I cheated on a g/f once in high school. She prompty dumped me. I’ve never cheated again. Looking back I respect her tons.)Report
Cuckolding as a fetish is people playing with the trappings of infidelity, but it’s not actually infidelity anymore than polyamory is.
It’s…acting and roleplay. A woman into being tied up and spanked by her husband is not the victim of spousal abuse, for example.
Cuckolding used in this political sense is, as Veronica notes, referring to spousal abuse and not happy spanking fun time. Don’t conflate the two.Report
Well, yes, but the origin of the term hardly has much to do with what sort of pornography exists under the term ‘cuck’. As LeeEsq says, the fetish is actually someone forced to *watch* that, who secretly enjoys it. (The fetish sounds a little masochistic to me.)
Anyway, I’m seeing very little evidence that such fetish *must* involve *black* men taking white men’s women. Seriously, no one appears to be able to specifically say that, and, frankly, I don’t want to run around googling porn fetishes to try to figure out if it *always* involves race. I suspect there’s interracial and…uniracial(?) versions of that.
*However*, reading up on the term, it appears the term cuckservative did, in fact, start with those connotations, being that it started on white supremacist sites and the analogy was: non-white people having sex with ‘our’ country, and white conservatives submitting to it because they secretly get turned on by the idea of losing their country.
Here’s what appears to be the first tweet about it: If you’re a white conservative but don’t stand up for whites, then you’re a cuckservative. #cuckservative — End Cultural Marxism (@genophilia) July 24, 2015
So, in short, I’m not sure that ‘cuck’ porn must involve race, but I’m pretty sure that ‘cuckservative’ *does*. Or, at least, did originally…I’m sure at this point the term has managed to escape the very poorly segregated white supremacist conservative areas, and is now loose in the wild.
And that, in itself, is pretty amazing also. But policing language is ‘PC’, right conservatives? Why *shouldn’t* conservatives use a term literally made up by white supremacist two weeks ago? At least there seems to be some push-back on that.Report
A little masochistic? It sounds extraordinarily masochistic to me.
The original fascists had a highly sexualized nightmare imagery to. The Nazis had the same sort of hate porn but it involved Jewish men rather than Black men.Report
Then you fail to understand human psychology and anatomy.Report
In the comments at this post at the popular alt-right blog RADIX Journal (mentioned prominently in Dodds’ post), one individual reports having been credited with originating the term last January.
Others, however, refer to a deeper origin tale suggesting that “Cuck” became a generally applicable prefix for racialized cuckold when an anti-white-person routine by Louis CK elicited a strong response in the far reaches of 4chan, 8chan, and /pol/, preparing the way for its later melding with “conservative.” A side-story concerns another alt-right writer proposing the term “conservakin,” that never caught on.Report
Wow, now I want to see that routine by Louis CK.Report
Maybe this one.Report
my inner-entomologist salutes you, @ck-macleod
I’m delighted you looked so that I don’t have to. Makes me feel unclean.Report
Yeah, I’ve already read at least two things on this topic that made me feel dirty, so I’m just stopping here.
And even *without* race, even assuming no racial overtones at all, this is all sorts of messed up.
I have to suggest seeing America as a woman, and imaging that she’s *your* woman and liberals don’t get to have sex with her, and then imagining that other conservatives *like* seeing ‘their woman’ have sex with liberals while they rage, claiming to be helpless but secretly liking it(1)…it’s, like, wow on top of wow. It’s like ‘Is that *really* how your brain works?’ Women are possessions, countries are possessions, it’s all sort of jumbled up in your head with jealousy and impotence and all sorts of weird stuff.
Seriously, you guys, see a therapist or something. You have issues.
1) I mean, at times, everyone in politics secretly wants to fail. They overextended themselves with promises or something, and know it would be a bad thing, and the easiest way out is for something external to stop them and they can go back to their people and say go ‘Well, I tried.’.
But the idea people are failing in politics as a *sexual fetish*? I mean, ‘failure’, as part of role-playing in sex, sure, whatever. But the idea that people are running around failing in the real world because they get off on it? And these people have managed to make it to high political office?Report
It’s not the failing that’s the fetish, it’s the rage the failing triggers, I think.
There are other ways to trigger that rage.Report
my inner-entomologist salutes you
Only if alt conservatives are a kind of insect. </pedantry>Report
Knowing things is not their strong suit.Report
OT: I read the Daily Beast link within the Salon article and find the Cuckold fetish to be extraordinarily creepy. It invoked my inner conservative. Enthusiastic consent might be the key virtue in the sexual and romantic ethics but it isn’t the only virtue and somethings really do deserve societal disproval even if all participants are enthusiastically consenting adults. Conservatives might have a point on why some restrictions beyond enthusiastic consent are necessary for a healthy society. The sexual fetishes that involve psychological, emotional, and even physical pain of a participant are probably not good for anybody involved or society at large. They are unethical because they involve doing things that should not be done under any circumstances. Even with a person’s consent, these acts are immoral.
The various philosophical justifications for cheating need to go and get bashed down hard. Monogamy combined with a decent amount of sexual freedom for both genders seems to produce the healthiest and most stable societies.Report
It’s swinging + voyuerism at it’s base. There can be an additional female domination element (I ran into the fact that there’s actually an inverse, wherein it’s the woman who watches her husband and another woman. You’d think that would be more common, but it appears to be rarer).
You start off by stating you find cuckolding immoral, but then expand to basically claim anything, even consensual, that involves pain (mental, physical, emotional) is immoral and triggers your inner sexual conservative. (If that’s not what you meant, please clarify. It’s entirely possible I misread)
Do you find tattoos immoral? Those hurt — and are permanent. Piercings?
How about gym rats? Martial arts? I can assure you, becoming a hard core gym junking or getting past black belt in a martial art often involves a great deal of pain.
Paintball? Rock climbing? You realize humans do a lot of things “for fun” that involve pain or large risks of getting hurt?
What makes a little spanking in bed so different? Or swinging? Or even watching your wife with another man?Report
Agreed. I like boxing. I also like complicated sex. @leeesq is going to judge me? On what grounds.Report
@veronica-d on the grounds that I and other people are allowed to have our own thoughts on these matters or anything else. Just because I don’t think that these sorts of things should be against the law or be socially enforced, doesn’t mean that I have to support them, agree with them, or think that they are good things. People are allowed to live their lives how they please, for the most part but that doesn’t mean that they have to meet with universal acceptance in their choices.Report
You were using words like “societal disapproval” and “some restrictions beyond consent” towards a vague list of acts that include the bulk of BDSM. That doesn’t sound like “whatever floats your boat, I just think it’s not gonna work for you”.
You can see where people misread that? Because that language sounds like “there outta be a law” and not “I can’t help but think that’s gonna end in tears for you, good luck”.Report
You have some very loud thoughts.Report
Thanks. I was going to write something to approximately that effect, but I would have probably had a hard time being civil about it (not that I think what @leeesq wrote was offensive, I’ve just been having a bad week w.r.t. both my own temper, and people being hurt even though I thought I’d been reasonably respectful and calm in my disagreement with them).Report
I don’t mean to pile on, but I’d disagree with the assertion that societies that disapprove of anything outside of vanilla sex are automatically more healthy or stable. There’s a lot of strange, inexplicable stuff tied up with our (very powerful) sex drives and repressing these things tends to, IMO, squeeze them out in other parts of life in weird ways. Better to work kinks out in a bedroom with consenting partners, than on unsuspecting strangers in real life.Report
@glyph, your assuming that people with kinky and powerful sex drives are going to have consenting adults to work these issues out in the bedroom with. Many times this isn’t the case. We would have a lot less complaining on the Internet otherwise. Either a person can not find a person willing to engage in their particular kinks with or they can’t find a consenting sex partner at all.* A lot of people are just going to have little to no sex life in any society regardless of the taboos or lack there of. Since this is the case, people are either going to have to control themselves because working it out on unsuspecting strangers in real life is going to have some bad consequences.
*I imagine that even with legalized commercial sex, finding a consenting commercial sex worker for some kinks is not going to be easy or cheap.Report
So you’ve changed to ‘non consenual sex is bad’ from ‘Kinky sex is bad’. Progress. 🙂
Also, you’re sort of still over-selling it. People complain endlessly about dating in general, about not finding the right man or woman. Do you think nobody dates? Marriages don’t happen?
Kinky people find each other all the time. In fact, if you don’t have fairly close relatives or friends who are kinky, I’d be shocked. (The numbers are quite high, especially with stuff like bondage and spanking. Rape play is a surprisingly common fantasy in women as well. I’m sure all three of those would trigger your inner conservative). People rarely discuss their sex lives with people they’re not wanting to sleep with.Report
My own sex/love life is non-existent, and this isn’t because I want it to be that way, so I try not listen to other people’s sex and relationship talk. It just enrages me and makes me feel excluded even if that isn’t that intent. At best and when I’m at my most cheerful, I find it incredibly boring.Report
@leeesq — That’s not a good excuse to be shitty about other people’s sex lives.Report
@veronica-d, I’d be less shitty about it if people didn’t engage in so much enlightenment preening about it and tell me why I’m a bad, no good patriarchal a-hole for what I want, don’t want and what I find hot and not hot. The kinksters are just as hypocritical as the prudes when it comes to this stuff. Why should they get to brag about sowing their wild oats while others are stuck with the full Victorian? I feel like the ant in the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, the version where the ant decides to save the grasshopper.Report
You’re not “stuck” with anything. Do what works for you. And while there are some loud preeners, most people keep their kink under wrap because of “societal disapprovers” like you.Report
@leeesq — Dude, lonely men get a raw deal. This is obvious, and I don’t blame you for being unhappy with how this shit plays out. But don’t be a dick to people who are not at fault.
Look, a lot of people were at one time where you are now. I was. Many on this forum were. It went on until — well — one day it stopped. You meet her (or him) and this time it’s different from before.
So yeah, this will probably happen to you. Someday. Maybe. Unless it doesn’t. And yeah, someday feels exactly the same as never, until someday arrives. So stay strong. Bitterness is a trap.Report
What enrages you? Not having a sex life? Not having a dating life? Everyone’s been there.
Kinky people, not-kinky people, everyone. It sucks. But the complaints of kinky people about dating are no different than the complaints of vanilla people, except over specifics. I’ve heard enough moans about ‘my wife doesn’t like sex’ or ‘my husband doesn’t seem to want to me’ to know that it ain’t just ropes and whips that compromise sexual incompatibility. Vanilla “I’m not getting what I want in bed” is, like, the oldest staple of comedy.
Nobody thinks you should like stuff you don’t like. Or even think the people doing it are in a healthy relationship. Different strokes, everyone’s got an opinion, whatever. What caught my eye was the…regulatory language you used, even if you didn’t mean it that way.
‘Cause “I don’t like that and I think you’re freaks for doing it” is your opinion. It might cost you a friendship with said freaks if you add that second half, but that’s your call. But “I don’t like that and I think it’s immoral and people shouldn’t be allowed to do it” — which ‘societal disapproval’ edges close to (society disapproved of gays, even after the laws were removed. You saw how that worked) and ‘regulations beyond consent’ is, you know, actually making laws.
And in the end, if a wife is having happy sex with another guy while her hubby watches, whether with approval, jealously, or what — is it hurting you? Society?
Whether it’s hurting them is…well, their concern. People box, play football, do karate, and have fun in a variety of ways that can hurt and kill them. Singling out sex over everything else seems…odd.Report
@leeesq — I mean, good grief. Can we agree that I’m talking about consensual sex? Can we agree I’m talking about sex between people who want to have sex with each other? Likewise, can we agree that they want to do the particular things that they do?
You said this:
Clearly you were not talking about the lonely person who cannot find love. You were, quite bluntly, talking about me, and many like me. The things I do, I do them with people who want to do them with me. It’s really nice, and if you have a problem with that, then you’re a ninny.
Anyway, it’s painfully easy for humans to find bad reasons to judge one another. Believe me, I can easily find people who will harshly judge you. It takes a bit more work to step back and ask, “Hey, is this thing bad in a broad sense, or is it just something I personally don’t like?”
I assure you, kinksters are not trying to trick you into doing stuff you don’t want to do.Report
“I assure you, kinksters are not trying to trick you into doing stuff you don’t want to do.”
While I’m sure there exist people who get their rocks off engaging in sexual acts with less-than-fully-enthuiastic partners, the vast, vast, vast majority of people only enjoy their preferences (be they vanilla or the kinkiest of kinks) when they engage in them with a happy, willing partner.
There are things, from a general perspective, I really enjoy to do in the bedroom. Some of these things, Zazzy does not enjoy. As such, we do not do them because it ain’t fun to know your partner isn’t enjoying what you’ve got going on.Report
@leeesq
Your logic is, frankly, assbackwards.
Do you concede that people are going to have certain “kinks” regardless of society’s approval? If so, denying people the ability to pursue these kinks in consenting relationships because some people will not be able to find those consenting relationships just means more people are going to be unsatisfied in their sex lives and will likely pursue some other, likely less healthy outlet.
You made a whole rant above about “things that should not be done”. According to whom?Report
Yes, I concede that people are going to have certain kinks regardless of what society thinks. They seem deeply rooted in biology. So are a lot of other things that humans make society better by suppressing or at least re-channeling.Report
How is society better without consenual kink?Report
I maintain that any gay person redirecting his passions for men into pedophilia is a horrible person in need of serious therapy (at which point he may cease to be a horrible person).
Rechanneling kinks is not always a Happy Good Thing.Report
So are a lot of other things that humans make society better by suppressing or at least re-channeling.
Let’s take something else that society suppresses and re-channels: the urge to violence. It’s a cliche that this is a lot of what sports is about.
But in many ways, sex and violence are polar-opposite urges – violence is about competition and the subjugation or destruction of the other, so re-channeling this urge is probably necessary to even HAVE a society.
Sex is (ideally) already about cooperation and comfort; and unlike violence, it’s often done in private and only affects the participants.
Where, exactly, would we even re-channel it to, if we aren’t down with letting people do what they like in private? I know I’d prefer it if multi-million-dollar sport stadia were instead utilized for Greco-Roman style mass bacchanals, but for some reason I think the average American won’t go for that.Report
Violence was what I was thinking about in my topic but I didn’t want to compare sex to violence. As to what sexual urges get re-channeled to, the answer is so obvious that I’m surprised you did not think of it; art, music, dance, and literature. Since people could not be openly sexual, the sexual energy got put into artistic endeavors. Dance was very closely linked with sex and it was the only way to engage in physical and somewhat sexual contact with people of the opposite genders before marriage for a long time before marriage. This is why the most puritanical cultures outlawed dancing outright or limited it to be between people of the same gender. In the West, people stopped learning how to dance while holding another person at the same time sexual morals became slightly liberated. Making out might not be sex but allowing heterosexual teens to engage in heavy kissing and touching was a lot more liberal than what was previously allowed.Report
Before I transitioned, I used to write a lot. Some of it was pretty good, if you’re the sort who likes trashy lesbian erotica with themes of desperation and profound yearning. (And who doesn’t like that?)
Now that I’ve transitioned, I barely write anymore. I’ve tried a few times, but I just don’t have the energy to sustain myself. Instead, I do tons of math.
Before I transitioned, I was deeply unhappy, completely broken sexually, and (all in all) a sad, pathetic waste of a life.
Now that I’ve transitioned, I’m pretty happy.
Yes, sublimation can produce art. I don’t recommend it, however.Report
I recommend it most heartily to any pedophiles who might be reading this.
I LIKED Last Exile.
(And no, I don’t understand what the fascination is with drawing prepubescent children beside giant intricate killing machines.
Not My Kink)Report
@kim — Uh….. what exactly are you saying here?Report
That it’s far preferable that pedophiles go draw their frustrations on paper rather than touching children.
And I like Last Exile, and I have at least glanced at entirely too many doujinshi.
At least I didn’t mention licking eyeballs…Report
@kim — I suppose, but nothing that I said had anything to do, even remotely, with pedophilia, so I’d kinda prefer if you didn’t segway from my talking about my own writing and my own kinks to that.
Eye licking, on the other hand, is HAWT (but probably rather unsanitary).Report
my apologies. I appear to be a bit more jaded than I thought.Report
@kim — It’s fine. I know you are — well — prone to make unexpected leaps of logic and strange associations, which actually is behavior I generally approve of.
Just, this association was a bit much for me.
Carry on.Report
I think you recognize that this isn’t reason talking, but your own frustration, something you’ve basically admitted here. At the very least, you’re not reacting to people judging you, as you always justify these outbursts of judgment here, as no one was judging you until you started judging people, and they’re still not judging you for being prudish, but for being openly judgmental. I can’t imagine people with “kinks” care all that much about your prudishness, as long as it doesn’t cause you to lash out at them as it has here. And I’m sure most of them will empathize with your frustration, as long as, again, it doesn’t cause you to lash out at them.
I’d suggest taking a deep breath.Report
If you see sex as a form of currency/wealth, it’s exceptionally understandable that someone who is currently not particularly romantically involved with anyone else (and is and has been frustrated fairly often with attempts to become so) would see public affirmations of ostentatious experiences as exceptionally frustrating.Report
wow, and people say I’m mean.
Eh, he hasn’t killed anyone yet.Report
I’m not trying to be mean.
I remember being in high school and being exceptionally frustrated at my complete lack of dating experiences and being angry that people who I held in much lower esteem than I held myself were dating successfully.
Now, I’m lucky enough to have had circumstances that worked out.
But, before they did? Dang.Report
I for one have had it with the sexual 1% lording it over the rest of us. The lovin’ inequality gap is growing ever-greater.Report
This isn’t really a 1% kinda thing. Luckily, for most people, there is an “enough” within reach. The problem is that the difference between “none” and “enough” is existentially infinite while “not enough” and “enough” is merely irritating.
But if I were going for a joke, I’d talk about Relationship Justice (or find some other word and put “Justice” after it) and stretch the analogy waaaaaay past the breaking point. (Redistribution, government policy, compliance testing, Departments of Relationships (or whatever), so on.)Report
I hesitate to wade too deep into this territory, as here there be mines aplenty, but one of the biggest barriers to finding a path out of that frustration is the shame and repression that comes with it, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to communicate the frustration to others, who may be able to help. There are many roads out of that particular swamp, all of which may be occluded from the view of a person with his or her feet stuck in the peat.Report
Personally, I found the entire field of dating advice to be unhelpful for a variety of reasons. Nearly all of it is trying to impose some sort of logic and reason on that which there is no logic or reason. Some of the advice might help but only slightly so. The most successful advice also seems to be the most unethical. People dispensing dating advice also have financial incentives not to give you the advice you need all at once so they can get more money from you.Report
I haven’t tread this thread yet, but seeing this comment in gifts of gab, it raised my eyebrows a bit to see that a post on the use of the word “cuckservatives” has morphed into a conversation on dating advice.Report
Both are about our sexual fears in the end. Seems an appropriate enough transformation.Report
@tod-kelly — But wait! Has anyone in this thread actually given dating advice?Report
I don’t mean “dating advice.” Sex /= dating.Report
Sex advice is filled with even more market and societal incentives for dishonesty than dating advice is. Too many people want to stomp down on the person that says the “wrong thing” in self-righteous anger.Report
Really? Wow…
My advice? Be yourself, be honest about who you are, and aim for people who will like you for you.
Guess what? I make ZERO DOLLARS on this deal.Report
Best dating advice that I have is terribly retrograde and sexist.
Two paths to go down:
1) Lower your standards
2) Raise your perceived value
#1 is fairly easy to do.
#2 involves working out, dieting, and otherwise getting a better body, getting your hair groomed by a professional, dressing better. (There are personality things that are options as well but I’m terribly introverted and anything that I’ve ever attempted to “be more extroverted!” has resulted in me experiencing pain after the initial terror has worn off.) There are gender-specific ones and the guy version is “make more money, demonstrate that you’d be a good provider”.
I suppose the unspoken #3 would be: Life Is Unfair.
So if you don’t like #2 or #3, #1 is always an option.Report
I actually do work out and get my hair done by an expensive professional and my clothing is more hipster than nerd. I’m not at Saul’s level of dandyism but my clothing is not cheap.Report
Well… do you have any personality tics that are communicated more strongly than you wish to communicate them?Report
Probably. My personality isn’t exactly nerdy but it isn’t mainstream either. Nerds tend to find me too normal and mainstream people aren’t really that sure what to make of me. Most people seem to find me likeable but some people just really have a strong distaste. My real life social circle includes a wide variety of people, so it is difficult to come to conclusions on my personality based on my friends in real life.Report
Well, there’s always #1.Report
Lee,
There’s plenty of logic and reason to everything.
Even “chemistry” surprisingly enough!
(and look, it’s even declassified! seriously, I have good citations and everything!)
Jay’s telling you below “you need to look better” — it’s not the case, really. Not if you want girls. The best guys at picking up chicks manage the whole “I’m a twelve year old in need of mothering” look. Just look at Fluffy-Top McNulty from the Wire… His face is objectively Ugly — but the dude pulls it off.
Sublimating sexual desires does actually do a detective good…Report
Socialized Love.Report
We’re more likely to end up with Venezuela than Denmark.Report
I was just trying to come up with a catchy name for the opposite of Free Love. Predicting the results was not the intent. Socialized Love sounds a lot better than Relationship Justice as a phrase.
Also, I prefer Sweden to Denmark. Copenhagen was too cutesy for my taste. Stockholm is a substantial city and if the weather was better close to my ideal of what a city should look like.Report
I can live with that.Report
Well, I mean, there was THAT GUY!Report
Too complicated to work, too heteronormative, and not gender neutral.Report
Oh, I completely understand why he would find it frustrating. Hell, I even understand being so frustrated that one lashes out. Just pointing out that I think even he realizes that’s what he’s doing, which means he probably understands that he should take a deep breath and drop the shovel.Report
@chris — Agreed. It’s hard to get the needed self-confidence and self-love when so much of our culture is telling you that you are a failure. It’s awful and it grinds people down.
I think it would be presumptuous for anyone to suggest there is an easy “out” for this, other than the long slog, until that day that all the pieces fall into place.
Which happens sooner or later for most people, but not for everyone. It sucks.Report
Lee,
or, they can go become politicians or priests, or otherwise become powerful enough to get the non-consenting.
The right wing conservative churches have pedophiles in every leadership position, because they make it so fucking easy to pull off nonconsensual sex with minors.Report
Lee,
“The sexual fetishes that involve psychological, emotional, and even physical pain of a participant are probably not good for anybody involved or society at large.”
I am surprised to hear you speak out against the male orgasm. If the human body wasn’t so good at pumping piles of “feel good” hormones into men, it would be extremely, extremely painful (and so when the system gets screwed up, it often is).Report
CATO ties the term to a push for REAL ID.Report
In addition to reading the Dodds post that Will Truman referenced, you might skim through the 203(and counting?) -comment discussion. Here’s a conservative responding (at length) to the appearance of the term: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/358061.php, and another: http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/23/whats-behind-the-cuckservative-slur-nsfw/
Among the ironies in that CATO piece would be that the “alt-right” would probably provide CATO with its most committed allies against the national ID.Report
The alt-right is the national id.Report
Could be. In social pscyhoanalytical terms it may count as the national “repressed,” always “returning” in different disguised ways, including in the form of its neurotic negation.Report
I’m a liberal and I actually think that a National ID card would be a good thing or at least a neutral thing if it can be done right; which I’m not that sure of.Report
or at least a neutral thing
if it can be done right;
which I’m not that sure of.
Just admit it, Lee. You’re OPPOSED. 🙂Report
I’m a liberal, and I find the objections to a national ID completely baffling. Most appear based on some sort of delusion that all our various identities aren’t *already* tied together in all sorts of databases. Guys, that all already exists, and it is *completely* outside your control.
If anything, having it all in one place would allow the possibility of controlling what data was given out. Where a bar can learn, for example, you’re over 21 and here’s the electronic photo of you…but nothing else, not even your name, if you don’t want them to. The voting place gets your voting precinct and name, etc, etc.
This would not be very difficult. It’s just smart card. Put a few lights on it indicating what data it was just asked for, and then you push a button on it to confirm (or put multiple buttons for different data, whatever.), whereupon it sends a time-based encrypted code that gets sent to the government’s ID server to get that specific data back.
It’s basically how credit cards with chips in them work, and we’re about to all upgrade to that. Or you can have it on your phone if you want. Could even two-factor it and make people type in a pin to use it.
On top of all that, assuming this is over some sort of NFC, it would be possible for people to verify *each other’s* ID without any sort of specialized equipment besides a cell phone, in a completely unfakable way.
I can’t actually figure out what sort of ‘failure mode’ people think is going to happen with a national ID outside of paranoid ravings about the government doing things it can *demonstratively* do already if it wanted.
Meanwhile, it solves something like half a dozen actual problems, and a lot of pretend problems on top of that. (In fact, at times I wonder if conservatives oppose national ID because, considering *no one* has one, there would obviously be a huge push to get them out there, and they would almost certainly be free and accessible in post offices…so a lot of voter ID nonsense laws would stop suppressing votes.)Report
CATO insists that the real danger of populist right-wing racism is the liberal federal government. Shocking.Report
It is indeed a “thing”. You might equate it to “quisling” A little bit different that RINO.Report
Has Rush ever used the term or is that just a smear you invented out of thin air? Most of the people who use the term are way more fringe than he is.Report
Well, it you’d at least read the link I provided, you’d have known it wasn’t a smear I invented out of thin air.
Show some respect.Report
The link you provided didn’t say anything about Rush using the term “cuckservative”.Report
If you split the hair just so…Report
In one sense you are correct. What Rush is quoted as saying is, “If Trump were your ordinary, average, cuckolded Republican”.
AND, the piece says “Rush Limbaugh helped spread the term to the mainstream …”
Now you come in here with an argument that Rush didn’t use the term “cuckservative”. That’s true, he used something related, that invokes the same meaning.
I seriously, honestly do not know why this matters to you and I’d like to know. Could you tell me?
Without any clear motive, it seems to me (and perhaps others here as well) that you just want to argue with us, and will find something, anything, to quibble over. Finding nothing of substance, you pick at nits. This is an irritating and alienating way of engaging with people. Once again, I say that I’d like to know what you really think and why you care about this detail.
(And as an aside, if your handle references what I think it references, it’s a big positive for me.)Report
I am not @dand but I feel that there is a huge difference. And that is not just to argue, but to actually look at the words, and use them at the meaning that is implied by the speaker. I am not of the right, but I am no longer of the left either, and it is in large part due to pieces like Joan Walsh’ that I owe that to. This is (to me) simply a way to take a simple set of words and amplify the meaning to what has become the defacto easiest way to call someone pure evil. A racist.
As someone who believes that racism is in a way the original sin of America, I am sickened by the current sledgehammer tactics of calling everyone who disagrees with you racist. Sickened, to the point that when someone calls something racist, I simply roll my eyes.
That doesn’t sound like sickened to you? That is too bad, as I feel that you are one of the best commenters here, @doctor-jay and I would like you to feel my pain at watching huge numbers of people roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders at racism because it has become trite.
You can agree with me or not agree, but watching people take two words with distinct meanings, spoken by someone they hate, and combine them in their heads to one word that wasn’t spoken and say no, that isn’t what was said. This isn’t just arguing for the sake of arguing. It is the whole damn point of this conversation.Report
I am not of the right, but I am no longer of the left either, and it is in large part due to pieces like Joan Walsh’ that I owe that to. This is (to me) simply a way to take a simple set of words and amplify the meaning to what has become the defacto easiest way to call someone pure evil. A racist.
As someone who believes that racism is in a way the original sin of America, I am sickened by the current sledgehammer tactics of calling everyone who disagrees with you racist. Sickened, to the point that when someone calls something racist, I simply roll my eyes.
Now this get’s to the heart of what puzzles me about this whole thing.
Because Joan Walsh only parroted what one faction of the right was calling the other. I kept sort-of pinching myself in disbelief that cuckservatives was a word like RINO, originating from the right, and not some sick smear from the left.
I find no end of puzzling out how it is that that you are sickened at Walsh for pointing it out, but not the sickened at the intent of the original coiners? If racism’s the original sin, how do the people calling out others for lack of it not drink deeply of that sin?Report
Walsh is the left wing noise machine.
That said, I am not sickened by the the people who call themselves that, as they have been called shit for so long that they believe that they are shit in the eyes of the left, and don’t care anymore what is thought of them. They are the end result of said left wing noise machine. Of course they are drinking deeply, that is all that is left for them. No healing, just denigration by her ilk.
Many people, here, there and elsewhere, think this is awesome. Just deserts and all that. To me, therein lies death. I came to the conclusion long ago that the left doesn’t want equality, it wants vengeance. And that wont lead to ending, or moving in the right direction even, many of the racial issues in America today.
So, yes, they are drinking in that sin, just like everyone else in that game. I am not sickened by them for the same reason I am not sickened by the desperate actions of African Americans in this present day. Again, you call people shit long enough, they are going to assume that they are in regards to you and act accordingly.
I am bothered by much of the indifference that arises with using the African American community as the pawns of team blue, as much as I am bothered by people shrugging off the plight of that community, as much of team red does. This is why I am a libertarian, as that is (to me) the only way forward in a multicultural society.Report
Sounds to me like you suggesting that talking about problems equals vengeance; which is pretty much a non-starter with me. I might sometimes, but it’s a pretty dark aspiration to cast on a whole lot of people who have no such thing in mind.
The only frame in which this makes any sense at all is one I see assumed by many libertarians: that we are all equal, and can we please talk about something else already.
Except that we are not all equal; at least by my standards of social justice. So no, I’ll talk about the problems, and it has 0% to do with vengeance, thank you.Report
“Except that we are not all equal; at least by my standards of social justice.”
I do not believe in “social justice” as other than vengeance, which is probably why we are talking past each other.Report
Obviously not; you think their creation as racist is do to the left-wing media machine as represented by Walsh; and you’ve never addressed what responsibility they hold for their own behavior, yet anyone else calling them to account for it is out for vengeance.
That’s some pretty weak tea, actually.Report
OK. Weak Tea then.
I don’t think the creation of them as racists is Walsh’s fault, because I don’t think they are racist. I do think that is JW’s reason for being, so I am not suprised that she did it, nor am I suprised that the left bought it. Hate sells.
I will repeat what I said, and that is that they (the right) have been called Shitty People for so long they said “OK, we are done here, we no longer care.” And I am going to get offended by them for that as much as I would BLM for its actions.
If you want to consider that weak tea, go ahead, no skin off my back.Report
They are the end result of said left wing noise machine. Of course they are drinking deeply, that is all that is left for them. No healing, just denigration by her ilk.
And I don’t understand this at all. She and her ilk created them? How? How do they not hold responsibility for their own behavior, just like everybody else?Report
That said, I am not sickened by the the people who call themselves that, as they have been called shit for so long that they believe that they are shit in the eyes of the left, and don’t care anymore what is thought of them. They are the end result of said left wing noise machine.
What are you talking about? What does the phrase ‘the people who call themselves that’ *mean*? No one calls *themselves* a cuckservative.
The alt-right is calling *other* parts of the right that. This is not something the left wing *made up*. This is not the result of the left wing noise machine in any possible way.
And at least *some* parts of the alt-right are using that term in specific racial way, although it is hypothetical possible not everyone using it are using it that way. (However, I think we can all agree that if Limbaugh does something that looks even vaguely like a racist dog whistle…it probably should be assumed to be a racist dog whistle. Limbaugh should really get no benefit of the doubt at this point. Actually, I’m not even sure what the point is worrying about what Limbaugh meant…Limbaugh has said such amazingly racist things over the years that it literally cannot matter if his use of a specific word was intended to be racist. It’s discussing if a specific grain of sand is on a beach.)
Of course they are drinking deeply, that is all that is left for them. No healing, just denigration by her ilk.
So let me recap: In your universe, the left has run around pointing out racism in so many places where it doesn’t actually exist, that a large segment of the right gave up and say ‘Fine, we’ll *be* racists, then?’
There are at least two things that make no sense there.
The first is that it rather disproves itself…if response to ‘anger at the left’ is ‘open racism’, than those people *were racist to start with*. It’s rather akin to if the bank steals all my money, so I decide ‘That’s enough, these guys are all criminals’…and then start ranting about Jews running the banks…hey, you know what? I was probably an anti-Semite to start with, I just didn’t *say* it aloud.
Especially since, just like most people who run my bank are probably not Jewish, most of the liberals they seem to think are accusing them of racism are probably not black. A prejudice against all liberals or all bankers would still be a prejudice, but it at least would be a *logical* result of what had happened. But to go from ‘liberals attack me’ to the conclusion of ‘so I’ll hate all black people’ is obviously some sort of a pre-existing prejudice against black people.
So saying ‘How dare the left accuse those poor, non-racist people of racism, because such a thing…drove them to blatant overt racism.’ is complete nonsense. That is not how that works. You want to blame anti-left hippy-punching on that, go ahead, but you can’t get to actual racism from there.
Secondly…the left doesn’t generally go around calling people racist in the first place. Not, like, normal people. Writers, public figures, sure, but those aren’t the people we’re talking about. So, if what you were describing actually happens, what you’re actually talking about isn’t the left saying ‘Your prejudices are bad’, it’s the left saying ‘*Prejudices* are bad’, and the listener *deciding* the left is talking about *them*.
Which is not what actually happened, because what you described is not what actually happened. What actually happens is that some people are overt racists because they are assholes with dumbass beliefs, and everyone hears how bad racists are, and are happy that they aren’t that. (Even if they are.)Report
There’s only so many times you can call someone an irredeemable, uneducable failure before they start to believe you.Report
This isn’t the first place I’ve seen “cuckservative” along with references to “cuck” porn, with the racial overlay. I’m a bit skeptical about just how much “cuck” porn there is in the world, but I am mindful of Rule 37. But in fact, the term “cuckservative” and the hashtag has been pretty indelibly associated with white supremacy.
It appears that you understand Rush’s use of “cuckolded Republican” to not have any particular racial animus, but instead is merely emasculating. Is that the issue?
The thing is, I don’t really find that emasculating rhetoric much better. I’ve never really paid much attention to Rush at all, so I have no thoughts on where he is on racial matters, only guesses which I won’t share.
Thanks for your kind words. I am generally non-violent, and as a corollary to that, I do not support shaming tactics. In this I understand myself to be in the minority. I am led by James Baldwin on this:
I think the pain is worth it, but advocating that people have a little more pain in their life is kind of an uphill climb.Report
Yes, it is more an emasculating idea, as far as I understand it. I haven’t heard Rush since my first wife and I split (her father, but I think she is a Republican,) But from what I have picked up from sites such as this, and my general eye rolling at screams of racism, for the most part the hard right hates (almost as much as they hate the left) the Chamber of Commerce type right, and do feel that they are emasculated. A good example would be that they could care less about the gov’t being shut down, as the R’s hold the power of the purse as leaders of the House of Reps. The fact that they backed down shows that they are emasculated.
As a group, I would say that they place a huge importance on masculinity for men. Good or bad (I am guessing from your past comments that you would take that as bad.) I personally excuse it in this context, as there really isn’t another word that works as well in a political context. I wouldn’t be surprised at the talking heads of the left it they used it in either a positive or negative way in regards to Obama and the Repubs.
Is there a possibility that it could be something much more sinister? Sure, but I would need a whole heck of a lot more to make that call.Report
“Cuckservative” originated on white-supremacist sites, and by “white-supremacist”, I don’t mean “nativist, anti-AA, and anti-illegal-immigrant”, I mean pro-white, anti-black, anti-Asian, anti-Jew, ready to call white people who don’t follow their line “race traitors”. These are stone racists, not people acting out because Joan Walsh was mean to them. They’re also thrilled that Trump is saying the same things about Mexicans that they do.
Limbaugh spends a hell of a lot of his day looking around the web and other media for stories [1]. He knows at least about this stuff as I do from my hour or two of research. So when he used the word “cuckold”, right at this moment, while discussing Trump, it’s not a fishing coincidence. He knows goddamn well what he’s doing. And it’s vile and it sickens me.
1. I feel like I need to point out that that’s not intended as a dig. He works hard, which is part of why he’s been successful for so long.Report
The preponderance of evidence supports the charge that Limbaugh was dog-whistling to the further-right, and the further-right is increasingly a segment that, at a minimum, rejects conventional anti-racism. Rejecting conventional anti-racism means adopting a permissive attitude toward racialized discourse, inevitably including “stone racist” racism. Even if Limbaugh was “cucking” unconsciously – picking up the term “from the air” – he certainly wants to remain in a position to exploit the attitude and include a lot of people he wouldn’t go out to dinner with. For people like him, Coulter, the Breitbartians, and others, the “cuck” charge is a natural, a more savage version of “RINO.” It’s possibly noteworthy that Radix and others have taken aim specifically at RS McCain, Chuck Johnson, and the Breitbartians, too – far right “edgy” cons – for “getting ‘cuckservatism’ wrong.” They are happy to un-settle people like Joan Walsh, zic, and the author of that Salon piece zic linked, but after the Trump moment has passed, they may give up on the “edgy” cons, and come to feel more threatened by pseudo-anti-cucks co-opting their concept.Report
@ck-macleod
I agree. The folks at Radix, Counter-Currents, Right Stuff all know exactly what the cukservative phrase means. The “hard-cons” just think it is the new, cool term they can use instead of RINO.Report
It does sound more insulting than RINO, which has basically been watered down to “Fellow Republican I disagree with right now”.Report
What’s the opposite of a euphemism treadmill? Where instead of a new clean word being dirtier by impolite use, a dirty insult being negated by overuse?Report
+1Report
If we derive such a term from the opposite of “euphemism”, it would be “dysphemism treadmill”.Report
Man, you are dysphemizing like a mo-fo.Report
According to Breitbart, in a piece championing the term and denying that it’s racist, Limbaugh
Which is a clear reference to the term, though not strictly speaking a use of it.Report
He provided a link to it on his website, so he did use that somewhat different pharase. http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/07/22/trump_was_supposed_to_be_gone_by_nowReport
Some context: This is a segment he did the same day. Other than those two segments, his archives don’t show any hits for “cuckold” since 2013. If his archives are in reverse chronological order, this would have aired immediately before the Trump segment, so it’s possible that his use of the term in the Trump segment was a reference to this.
Also worth noting that Limbaugh’s use of it wasn’t in reference to either race or immigration, but to Trump’s refusal to apologize for his McCain remarks.Report
Adding to what zic and Mike said, when did Rush become “fringe”?Report
Sometime around 2112.Report
They’ve always been a fly by night type of band.Report
In the year 6565
ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife
you’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too
from the bottom of a long glass tubeReport