Cuckold
Related: adultery - paraphilia - sexual fantasy
Definition
A cuckold is, quite simply, a man with an unfaithful wife. There are connotations of helplessness and humiliation attributed to the word, implications that the husband is helpless to stop her infidelity, and too cowardly to leave the wife. "Cuckold" appears in older texts as a highly insulting and pejorative term.
Cuckolds are sometimes written of as "wearing the horns of a cuckold" or just "wearing the horns". This goes back to an unsubstantiated reference to a tradition in villages of unknown European location where the community gathers to collectively humiliate a man whose wife gives birth to a child recognizably not his own. This is said to have been a parade where the hapless husband is forced to wear antlers on his head as a symbol of his wife’s infidelity. Whether this actually happened or not is irrelevant to the phrase, which survived.
The history of the word is thought to be related to the Cuckoo bird, who is known to put its eggs in another bird's nest. Some think that this points to another hallmark of the cuckold – the raising of a child that is not his own.
Today the term is making a resurgence amongst non-monogamous couples with a dominant female allowed to take on additional partners, and submissive male who is not. --http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold
Cuckold at imdb.com
http://www.imdb.com/keyword/cuckold/Candaulism
Candaulism is a paraphilia, consisting in the masochistic and/or sadistic pleasure in which the husband exposes his wife, or pictures of her, to other voyeurist people; hence the term candaulism which derives its name (proposed by Gugitz) from ancient King Candaules who made a plot to show his unaware naked wife to his servant Gyges of Lydia. She discovered Gyges, while he was watching her naked, and ordered him to choose between killing himself or killing her husband in order to repair the vicious mischief. Sometimes this behavior is taken to the extreme point, allowing complete sexual relations, practice defined by many English speaking people in the swinging subculture as cuckoldry. In certain cases the relation evolves into a stable union of three persons, this is known as triolism. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candaulism [May 2006]
Othello
Shakespeare didn’t make up the story of Othello.The story of an older man cuckolded by his young wife was a popular story and source of drama from classical Greece and Rome on. [To be cuckolded is to have one's wife be unfaithful without one's knowledge. One then becomes the butt of jokes behind one's back. The sign of the cuckold is horns – like the horns on a deer. People would put horns up behind your head and laugh at you.] As Harold Bloom points out, a man's fear of being cuckolded and being sexually inadequate is the fear of his mortality. --http://pages.cabrini.edu/jzurek/shakes/othelloplay.htm
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