The "Cuck Chair": From Pornography to a Metaphor for Social Media

A few months ago it was impossible to be on Twitter without running into some variation of "while you're doing whatever, some slick dude is banging your girlfriend." It was a comedy format in which a real man (you) was compared to an imaginary one (better). The idea was that someone was occupying a spot that was yours, and you were just watching or off doing something else.

The latest version of this format is "your boyfriend, the one who can't" do such and such. All the variations that bring to mind castration. Anyway, every time I log onto Twitter there seem to be a bunch of people talking about infidelity, about not being enough for a woman, or some combination of the two, often from a pretty pornographic place.

Trying to trace the origin of this kind of joke, trying to peel back the layers of the loop, I find it impossible to ignore "cuck," an insult whose use has increased significantly over the last decade. A few years ago it was at the center of several news articles analyzing its use in the U.S. political landscape.

I remember I started noticing it around the time of Gamergate, when it was pretty common to come across it in forums and communities with heavy participation from users tied to the alt-right.

If we look at the chart we can see it just keeps growing. Still, before the current peak, there are two spikes between 2016 and 2018. Those two are related to Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton and the insult's spread into mainstream politics with terms like cuckservative.

"Cuck" is an insult whose use has increased significantly over the last decade. A few years ago it was at the center of several news articles analyzing its use in the U.S. political landscape.

For those who don't know, cuckporn is basically people who enjoy watching their partners have sex with other people. It's not a threesome, since the boyfriend doesn't participate. It comes from the word cuckold, referring to how the cuckoo bird lays eggs in other birds' nests, and it was used quite a bit by William Shakespeare.

According to various sexologists, this fetish can have several motivations: humiliation, masochism, control, exhibitionism, or some combination of all of the above.

After the term caught on, it came to be defined in street terms as someone who watches from the outside while another guy takes his place, regardless of the context, which makes it pretty close to common tropes in soccer like "the guy watching it on TV" or the guy sitting on the bench.

After the term blew up in the wake of the 2016 U.S. elections, a report published by Pornhub listed cuckold as the category with the biggest increase in views in 2017, growing 72% over the previous year. So while cuck was becoming an increasingly generic term, the fetish it came from was also starting to grow within porn. In the following years it showed up again among the searches with the biggest increases, and by 2025 searches for cuckold had grown another 73% over the previous year.

I'm not so sure there's a direct relationship between the rise of cuck porn and the internet's obsession with making jokes about somebody banging your lady. It might simply be a successful shape that formats take on within platforms. After all, porn is a huge engine of technological progress.

There's a concept in biology called carcinization. It basically describes a phenomenon in which different crustaceans, separated by millions of years of evolution, end up looking more and more like a crab. They're really not related as species, but mysteriously the crab shape turns out to be convenient.

I don't think there's any marine biologist out there itching to check whether Twitch is mutating into Pornhub, but it seems to me that pornography is the north star of every platform, because it pays. Not necessarily porn with people in the buff (although plenty of platforms trend that way), but porn as a structure. Everything starts organizing itself around watching someone else and engaging in masturbatory practices. Now, doing that with or without a screen is a big leap.

Pornhub listed cuckold as the category with the biggest increase in views in 2017, growing 72% over the previous year.

I think we have to admit there's something paradoxical about all of this happening on the internet. We're in a place where a good chunk of what we do consists precisely of watching other people do things over and over. We watch people play video games we own, people eat things we could eat, unbox things we can't afford, react to movies with more expertise than we have, wander through far-off cities, study, or simply live a life that for some reason interests us more (for thirty seconds) than our own.

This doesn't mean watching is necessarily a degraded version of doing those things, but you could argue that everything tends toward a pretty explicit point. What generates engagement is the pursuit of emotional reactions. A big part of platform optimization tends to take porn platforms as its reference, raw and dry, precisely for that effect.

Shout-out to Baudrillard, who thought of the pornographic beyond sex and linked it to a hypertrophy of visibility, where everything must be exposed more and more until secrecy and distance are eliminated. He would have loved TikTok.

I won't swear on it, but maybe that's why we use porn to talk about so many things that have nothing to do with sex. Beyond the worn-out line wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde, there are thousands of things like foodporn, travelporn, architectureporn, productivityporn, studyporn, bookporn, not to mention those reels of chefs sexualizing food.

Distance is eliminated, long processes are reduced to short clips, the way certain actions get performed is entirely subordinated to the camera and the best possible angle. Some people even only talk for the clip.

The activity becomes independent of its former purpose and starts existing to be contemplated as a source of satisfaction, period. There's a regime of visibility that is slowly overtaking the regime of livability.

In that sense, streaming and certain pornographic genres, rather than being isolated phenomena, are symptoms of an across-the-board transformation in the way people relate to spectacle and to experiences in general. That is, the goal isn't to improve the experience of the participants (the diner, for example), but that of the observers.

In porn this happens pretty literally, with positions that aren't necessarily the most comfortable or pleasurable but that let the camera better capture what's going on or better display the body, whether for its appeal or its performance. In the rest of the content, in far less sexual ways, the same elements are starting to get incorporated.

Distance is eliminated, long processes are reduced to short clips, the way certain actions get performed is entirely subordinated to the camera and the best possible angle.

There's no need to rehash the much-discussed idea that the internet makes us constantly compare ourselves to others. What's more interesting (and more negative) is our relationship with whatever makes us feel inferior. The algorithm doesn't need to know whether a video destroys your self-esteem. It operates more in the regime of the visible, above the livable. So if it keeps you around, it's all the same. If it can be seen, it doesn't matter if it ruins your life, so to speak.

In this constant exposure that forces people to compare themselves against an infinity of people with more money, more beauty, more success, it struck me that the most relevant category ends up being analogous to that of the cuckold.

Another thing worth adding is that the cuckold fetish seems to be predominantly male, and the most common motivation tends to be tied to the pleasure of humiliation. In plain terms, trying not to kinkshame too much, it's watching how someone "better than you" is with your lady while you, meanwhile, hide in the closet dressed as Superman or something like that.

The defining feature of the insult isn't just the sexual component but the structure of that desire. The cuckold gets pleasure from watching someone else enjoy what would conventionally be "his."

Some men deliberately seek out someone they consider superior to them: more attractive, more muscular, more successful, or simply more desirable. Some influencers have even said they've gotten propositions from men who wanted to watch them with their partners precisely because they saw them as aspirational figures. In those cases the pleasure doesn't seem to come only from watching sex, but from a certain comparison. They get off on someone else making up for their own inadequacy in bed.

From that same fantasy comes the cuck chair, those armchairs that show up in hotel rooms suspiciously angled toward the bed and that, according to the joke, are placed there so the cuckold can sit down and watch.

As usually happens with this kind of term, eventually there no longer had to be an actual cuckold situation; it was enough for a chair to be a little too close to a bed for it to be funny.

Another component is the racial one, because the vast majority of the time the cuckold is a scrawny white guy and the one having sex with his wife is Black or Latino, generally more muscular, taller, more virile, etc. It's no surprise that cuck started showing up in alt-right forums, where several of those sexual anxieties/fears could translate pretty easily into political anxieties/fears, like the Great Replacement Theory.

During Trump's campaign, cuckservative started being used against moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, accused of being too weak on immigration and other issues. The metaphor worked because the analogy was pretty direct. If we wanted to find some discriminatory Argentine equivalent, it would be "your girlfriend's getting banged by some guy from the slums."

The idea, on top of that, is that the man doesn't just find himself in a position of inferiority to someone superior, but that he enjoys it so much he actually sets up the encounter.

Now, back to the meme: the cuck chair strikes me as brilliant as a metaphor for these times. From the outside it's the loser's seat, though for the cuck it may be the spot from which he wants to take part. He doesn't "get the girl," but he's still part of the experience. In some way defeat comes pre-equipped with a position from which you can keep on being in the situation.

The internet offers a gigantic quantity of experiences whose purpose is to channel frustrations before they mutate into something that takes you out of the circuit. It's a psycho machine that serves to capture the malaise and also the attempts to resolve it. I mean, it provides an experience that is unpleasant by ordinary social rules but is still sought out, organized and repeated because it produces another kind of satisfaction. The platform doesn't need that experience to be pleasurable, because all it needs is for it to continue.

So I think this sequence shows up in the form of gambling, porn, doomscrolling, ragebait, blackpill, or even compulsive consumption. The subject keeps coming back even when they no longer really know whether what they're getting is a reward or a punishment. Pleasure and pain start to blur, because to the platform it makes no economic difference, as long as people stay in the loop.

In the cuck scenario, desire accommodates itself to defeat. The chair stops being the uncomfortable place you want to get up from and becomes the place from which you can keep taking part as an observer. The figure strikes me as so contemporary because the internet is full of similar little workarounds. Faced with things that make us feel powerless, inferior or frustrated, platforms offer ways to look at them, replay them, eroticize them, argue about them and turn them into an identity without engaging much with whatever actually caused them.

The only real thing in the joke about "some thug is banging your girlfriend" is the insecurity, because there's no thug and I don't think there's a girlfriend either.