Cucks are having their pop culture moment, from HBO productions like Mountainhead and The White Lotus to Apple TV+’s Your Friends and Neighbors, to the Manhattan courtroom where Sean “Diddy” Combs stands trial.

The word cuck, short for cuckold, refers to a man whose female partner has sex with other men, often humiliating him in the process. It alludes to the cuckoo bird, because of its tendency to lay its eggs in the nests of other birds. The word dates back to medieval times: References to cuckolds are found in the works of Chaucer and William Shakespeare. Humiliated men are natural fodder for drama.

That’s especially true today, an age when the term cuckold has been co-opted and shortened by conservatives, who demean moderate or conservative men they deem to be soft as “cucks.” Liberals (and sometimes fellow conservatives) have fired back by calling supposedly soft right-wingers as “cuckservatives.” The phrase has also come into common use to refer to anyone who is a sucker or rube.

But cuckolding need not be humiliating: For some, it’s a turn-on. Some research indicates that as many as 20 percent of North Americans have engaged in consensual non-monogamy, or CNM. (This of course includes men who have sex with multiple women, who are not, by definition, cuckolds.)

Hollywood’s cuck fascination may just be catching up to the general population. PornHub’s 2024 Year in Review, one annual indicator of people’s secret desires, indicated a slight uptick in the terms “cuckold wife” (up 8%,) and “wife swap” (up 6%).  

And as modern pop culture reflects, cuckery is complicated: Sexologist Jill McDevitt has said that it can be a form of masochism or sadism. Some cuckolds enjoy “the arousal that comes from relinquishing power and being humiliated,” she told Men’s Health last year. Others, she said, enjoy watching their partner with someone else, from a sadistic perspective, because he is role-playing “getting revenge on his partner by pimping her out.”

Nowhere is the complication more evident than in the Diddy trial, where the rap impresario is accused of hiring male escorts to have sex with his then-partner, Cassie Ventura, in “freakoffs,” or, in their shorthand, FOs. Prosecutors say the freakoffs amounted to sex trafficking, but Diddy’s lawyers have used texts between Ventura and Combs to argue that they were consensual, and that she enjoyed the freakoffs.

Jurors will have to decide whether Diddy’s orchestration of his partner into something that has been, since Shakespeare’s time, a shorthand for humiliation was, in fact, a power move — and abuse of power.

Hollywood is asking viewers to ask the same questions about a wide range of fictional characters. But what’s different about the cucks of today and the cucks of old is that today’s cucks are often fully aware of their partner’s sex with others, if not fully on board.

Hollywood’s Fascination With Cucks

In Wes Anderson’s 2021 The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Murray’s Raleigh St. Clair cuts a pitiable figure as he realizes the extent of his wife Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow’s) cheating: “You’ve made a cuckold of me,” he laments.

But the Hollywood cuckolds of today are likely to be well aware of their partner’s cheating, if not encouraging of it.

Whatever the reasons, cucks and cuckery are very much in the zeitgeist, especially on prestige TV: On Season 3 of The White Lotus, the malevolent Greg Hunt (Jon Gries), who recently came into a fortune via the murder of his wife, has a fetish for watching his new partner with younger men. In the new HBO film Mountainhead, the sole likable character, Jeff (Ramy Youssef), is a multibillionaire who doesn’t want his significant other going to a sex party in Mexico, but feels powerless to tell her it’s a dealbreaker. He is open with the other powerful men in his wealthy cohort about his hopes that she won’t sleep with anyone else. 

Jesse Armstrong, the writer-director of Mountainhead, previously examined cuckoldry on his show Succession, in which Tom Wambsgans (Matthew MacFayden) was afraid his wife Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) would leave him if he objected to her sleeping around. 

Perhaps the most prominent cuckold now on television is Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm), the protagonist of Apple TV+’s hit Your Friends and Neighbors. Coop appears, in most senses, to be an alpha male: He has a big house, a huge finance job, and a Maserati. In some ways he’s a modern Don Draper, the sturdy, traditional alpha Hamm played on Mad Man.

But Coop becomes a cuckold against his will when his wife Mel (Amanda Peet), sleeps with one of his best friends, former NBA star Nick (Mark Tallman). Unlike many other TV cucks, Coop exits the marriage because of her infidelity. But in a shock to all the friends and neighbors of the show’s title, Coop remains friendly with both Mel and Nick, and even shocks everyone by attending a party at Nick’s house. (He gets in a fight there — but not with Nick.)

In an interesting reversal, Coop makes a cuck of the man who cucked him when he sleeps with Mel on a visit to Princeton. Nick doesn’t take it well, punching Coop. But, soon after, they put their differences aside and bro out with a night on the town. 

Perhaps both are heeding the words of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello: “Beware, my lord, of jealousy/It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on/That cuckold lives in bliss/Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger.”

Main image: Ramy Youssef as Jeff in Mountainhead. HBO