Episode
What the Cuck?!
- Podcast
- Decoder Ring
- Published
- Oct 8, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 3103
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
Earlier this year, a tweet went out from the official account of the Democratic Party, tagging the Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It was an image of what appeared to be a simple hotel room chair. But for those in the know, it was much more than that: It was a “cuck chair,” an online meme straight out of a popular genre of hardcore pornography in which a man watches his partner have sex with another man. How did we get to a place where the Democrats could flame a political opponent with an image out of cucking porn and have millions of people immediately understand it? In this episode we trace the complicated and intricate history of the cuck. It’s a history that includes everything from Jacobean dramas to World War II pilots to, yes, pornography, as well as a host of deeply American prejudices that have become a lot less submerged over the last 10 years. And we also situate the cuck within a larger context, one in which porn is the elephant in the room of American culture. It’s a potent force, shaping and reflecting our very wants and desires and it is constantly seeping into mainstream culture—and yet we don’t analyze, critique, or even talk about it very much because, well, it’s porn. In this NSFW episode, you’ll hear from: Slate staff writer Luke Winkie who wrote about the tweet that kicked this episode off ; Samantha Cole , one of co-founders of 404 Media and the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex ; Jennifer Panek , professor of English at the University of Ottawa; sex therapist and clinical psychologist Dr. David S. Ley ; Dr. Justin Lehmiller , social psychologist, senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, and podcast host ; Mireille Miller-Young , associate professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara and the author of A…