the feminine cuck
Have you thought about your kinks today? Take a page out of Nikki Glaser’s book. In an episode of Call Her Daddy, she talks a whole lot about her relationship to sex. Which yeah, go figure, that’s how the podcast works. But as a non-believer in the Daddy Gang denomination, her cuckquean1 kink admission finally drew me to the show. Glaser loves to hear about her boyfriend’s hookups with other women. She’s turned on by his affairs and even encourages him to create more stories for her (read: embark on as many one-night-stands as possible.) Does she reciprocate? Is she sleeping around for his fantasy storage bank? No, silly! Men are gross. Gross, she says! Why would she do that to herself? One-way monogamy or bust.
If that term sent a shiver down your spine and you don’t know why, you may have watched Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. Kristen, the stay-at-home girlfriend of influencer Justin Waller, expounds upon the merits of this concept, in which her boyfriend sleeps around sans repercussions while she tends to their children, content with him only. She’s not the only one. Amanda Batula crucified herself on the Summer House cross by sleeping with notorious womanizer West Wilson, openly accepting his roster of sexual partners while refusing the same practice. And a host of unethical open marriage memoirs from female writers suggests an uptick in its popularity as a media topic. To be a modern-day hetero woman, it seems you must accept the innate nonmonogamy in your male partners while cloistering yourself up like a nun. Or worse, sleep with extramarital losers while your husband gets additional emotional labor from his new girlfriend. God forbid that lifestyle creep.
These women don’t need my scorn. I think they’ve been thoroughly chastised already.2 If I could get in a room with any one of them, I’d simply ask why their sexual interests lie on this one-way street. Why do they accept their partner’s promiscuity while their own avenue to pleasure is relegated to one single man? Have these women explored the reasoning behind their sexual abnegation? Why do they never initiate nonmonogamy on their own? To embody the practice with agency instead of coercion? Even if they acquiesce to opening the marriage and dating around themselves, it never becomes a mutual celebration. More like a Hail Mary to save their ship from D I V O R C E. The woman in question may parrot the talking points, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. Always what the husband needs, wants, proclaims as the right way to do things. Gender norms seeping into the most intimate of decisions.
In his book Tell Me What You Want: the Science Behind Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life, Justin Lehmiller presents cuckqueaning (among other forms of nonmonogamy) as an example of the “self-expansion theory, the idea that humans have a need to continually grow and expand the self in order to be satisfied with their lives… (f)rom this perspective, then, fantasies about consensual nonmonogamy can be viewed as an outgrowth of our ongoing quest for self-expansion.”3 Glaser and Cooper takes us through this need for “self-expansion” during the podcast. They speak at length about their sexual disappointments early in life; Glaser brings up the terror she felt from engaging in physical intimacy while Cooper laments the young straight man’s foreplay as sucking his dick before vaginal penetration. Cuckqueaning thus appears like a knight in self-expansion armor. Glaser builds up an auditory repertoire of sexual fantasies using her boyfriend as a conduit without the decentering humiliation that can come with bad hetero sex. She loves and trusts the One Single Man in her life, why would she subject herself to the horrors of, say, skid marks on fresh sheets?
Is this the correct conclusion to draw, though? I understand the sentiment, yet there still seems to be an imbalance in place. Listening to Glaser, it sounds like her cuckquean fetish is still born of her youthful anxiety around intimacy, not as an embodied adult practice that brings her pleasure, interest, and fun. When I read stories about cuckolded men, their humiliation is the erotic part, not an albatross hung round their necks that they must navigate constantly. They don’t seem to feel any relief in offloading the emotional and physical discomforts from casual sex onto their cucked partner like Glaser does with her boyfriend. Cuckolding is just purely naked joy for them. What I actually think the problem comes down to, and what cuckqueaning doesn’t fully address when practiced this way, is the feminine duty towards sexual cleanliness enforced on us since birth.
There are two types of sexual cleanliness women must adhere to under the patriarchy: physical and moral. Physically, women must groom themselves into tip-top shape before they can engage in any form of intimacy, even a mere first dinner date. Think “everything shower;” invasive and extensive hair removal (armpits legs eyebrows pubic maybe arms if you’re a real masochist;) douching (“not a question, more of a command and observation: close your legs girl. I smell the sea” from caleb hearon himself;) blow-dried and styled locks; skincare and makeup routine; appropriate sexy outfit to convey an air of refined sultriness; lotion, body oil, and perfume all before you even walk out the door. Compare to the hetero man: hopefully he showers and brushes his teeth, but the barrier to entry for penetrative sex is practically nonexistent in terms of his self-grooming practice. Straight women can bypass anything to secure the so-called love of their life, even if that love smells rank.
Which brings me to the second type: cuckqueaning allows straight women to reinforce a sense of moral cleanliness. The dreaded “body count” discourse infiltrates everything from abstinence-based education to Love Island party games. When women speak openly and honestly about their extensive sexual history, the general public acts like she exploded a cannonball directly into her vagina. It’s not just slut-shaming, it’s a cultural incredulity at inviting that many stinky smelly disreputable men into her life. If it’s completely socially acceptable for them to give you a mediocre time, why hook up with ten, twenty, a hundred men if they’ve no incentive for foreplay? Eroticism? A mutual assurance for pleasure? Moral degradation is presumably an inherent component to hetero relationships. Why debase yourself with the multitudes when you only need one to publicly mortify you and privately let you down? Choosing to be an ethical-if-undervalued slut is thus a failure of virtues in the carnal sense as well as the conservative one. It is one thing to get deliberately dirty with your reputation on the line; it is another to know there’s no physically stimulating benefit for you. At all.
Lehmiller is correct. Hetero sex should be expansive in its practices, filled with curiosity, joy, and reciprocity. Yet even cuckqueaning, a fresh avenue for hetero couples to explore outside off the straitjackets of procreative sex, is still bogged down by the threat of physical and moral impurity.
In its current cultural iteration, it gives only the illusion of an enlightened sexual practice. Glaser makes it clear to the Daddy Gang that she is never in the room with her boyfriend when he sleeps with other women. A stark departure from how cuckolding is depicted; I can’t remember a single instance, whether real or fictional, where a guy preferred to hear his girlfriend’s trysts afterwards instead of being the front row audience. Maybe she could begin to destigmatize herself to her own proclivity for cleanliness if she did get in the room with them. After all, the Cosmopolitan does say that “the appeal of cuckqueaning often lies in its emotional complexity. For some women, it’s about control; they may enjoy directing a scene, and choosing who gets touched and how. For others…it may be rooted in voyeurism and vulnerability.”4 Why not try to direct a scene? If cuckqueaning really is your thing, wouldn’t it be interesting, even liberating, to orchestrate the dalliance? Why are straight women so afraid of taking charge of their own sex? Why is there such enjoyment in passivity, whether it’s the stereotype of a bratty sub or as a secondhand source to their boyfriend’s exploits, miles away from the locus of desire?
Well. Shit. Is my interrogation just kinkshaming? Hope not. I’m simply bored of the standard sexual practices between man and common law wife. If you’re gonna get freaky, maybe try to be the overseer of the bedroom for once. Take initiative in your own kink, or try a new one on for size, even if it feels like you’re breaking the rules that don’t even exist. Get down and dirty, really really down, really really really dirty, for once!
"a 'partnered dynamic in which a woman becomes aroused emotionally, psychologically, or voyeuristically by her partner's intimate involvement with someone else."' --> https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/sex/a65400216/cuckquean/
but to clarify: #TeamCiara.
Justin J. Lehmiller, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life (Balance, 200,) pp. 117-118.
Sophie Williams, "What is a cuckquean? An expert guide to this voyeuristic, woman-led kink," Cosmopolitan, July 15, 2025, pp. 6, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/sex/a65400216/cuckquean/