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Dear Lina,
I am SO curious about being cucked. Sounds super hot. However I can’t get over that my DD is still having sex with someone else, & he doesn’t want to share me whatsoever. He says he’s curious about doing something like that (cucking me), but since it’s not equal he doesn’t care to/just wants me/no one else.
I dunno how to fulfill this fantasy without desiring a quid pro quo. My husband/DD is just monogamous 100%. He says I don’t know why I’m a sub I just am, and it’s the same way with him with monogamy, which is a boundary I can accept. Do you have any advice?
Recently I popped off on Twitter with all my most controversial takes about BDSM, sexuality, and dating. But this question reminded me that I forgot one, and it’s definitely one of the most controversial. Ready? Are you sitting down?
All group play, especially threesomes, involves cucking.
How we doing? Ok? Ok.
Some footnotes before I get any further:
Cucking is a weird term. As any casual Shakespeare fan can tell you, the term “cuckold” has deep roots in Western culture. I still remember the giggles in high school English when we covered Othello, particularly Iago’s famous speech. Let’s revisit it, shall we?
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:
But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!
This is Iago poisoning Othello against his wife Desdemona, whom Othello believes is having an affair with Cassio. The play is obviously about a lot of things, but if I was your Cool Guy English Teacher about to sit on a chair backwards and tell it to you straight, I might say my friend Billy Shakes was making a point about fragile masculinity, and how easily manipulated we are when we can’t communicate with our partners. Then I would probably dab.
In a modern context “cucking” has even more meanings. The swinger community has its own relationship to the word and a bunch of other lingo associated with it which I won’t go into too deeply. In that community, and ours too, “cucking” is the term for watching your partner have sex with someone else with the intention of inspiring jealousy and humiliation in the watcher. “Hot Wifing” (a term that is not my favorite for about a hundred reasons) is the opposite. As the term implies, it’s like “look at my hot wife fucking another man. She is so hot.”
(For an insider peek into the swinger community’s perspective on the difference between these terms, check out this reddit thread. To be clear, I’m not cosigning anything said here, particularly the typo-ridden, paragraphs long assertion that cucking is tied into evolution which then devolves into a very unscientific discussion of semen which links to exactly zero peer-reviewed studies to back up its claims.)
As a queer woman who enjoys watching her Dom do group play with other subs, neither of these terms is exactly right for me. However, I’ve reclaimed the word “cuck” because it is also heavily used by right-wing weirdos online to police the lines of the very limited expressions of macho masculinity they will accept, and wrenching a term away from these snowflakes is one of my most treasured goals in this life.
So ok, now that my footnotes are out of the way, why do all group scenes involve an element of cucking?
I think the main issue with the cuckold/hotwife dichotomy is that neither accounts for the complex feelings that arise while watching your partner have sex with another person, and each provides its own rigid pass/fail grading system for the watcher. Feeling compersion and excitement while watching what’s supposed to be a cucking scene? Sorry, you’ve failed. Feeling jealousy or concern during a hot-wifing scene? Failed again!!
Of course, each of these themes can play up or down in a scene as negotiated by the participants. I’ve done scenes where the closest I come to cucking is simply the moments where I’m lying right next to the action waiting for my turn which will arrive in about 2-5 minutes. I’ve also done scenes where I’m bound, gagged, and left in the corner for the duration of the entire scene. The ways of messing around with the humiliation dials are many. It can just be physical removal from the scene, it can also be words or actions. And the opposite is true if I want to feel closer, my Dom can pull me closer. So talking about your degrees of humiliation or closeness is an important and required factor of negotiation when planning a group scene.
The problem is when people go into group play and think, “I love bodies, I love sex, I really like all these people involved, so I’m going to spend this whole experience feeling GREAT!!”
There certainly are very cool people who can just spontaneously mush their bodies against a group of other bodies and just feel nothing but euphoria the whole time. And those people are high on MDMA.
I’m kidding. I think. But as a more rigid and anxious little sub myself, I’m always going to be an advocate for thinking about the worst case scenario, then gently inviting it into the conversation.
When I was psyching myself up to get into threesome play for the first time (something you can hear me and my Dom talk about in His Deep Dive interview), a piece of advice that really made a difference for me came from, where else, Dan Savage. He often advises listeners that there will always be a moment where someone is left out in a threesome. It’s an undeniable fact of the geometry of three bodies. So with that in mind, I approached threesomes like jealousy and weird feelings were part of the experience, and counterbalancing them was part of the negotiation process. And that has served me very well.
But your question, questioner, about feeling the need for a quid pro quo contains a lot of stuff that often comes up around this topic. Some of the stuff, to the best of my understanding of your question, is:
1. Your DD wants to have sex with someone else in front of you
2. Your DD is monogamous
3. Therefore he doesn’t want you to have sex with someone else in front of him (seemingly including the person he’s cucking you with if I’m not mistaken)
4. His concerns are rooted in the idea that if it’s not perfectly equal for both of you, you shouldn’t do it
First of all, if I’m reading your question correctly, your DD is saying that he wants to cuck you, but you cannot do the same because he is monogamous. Not to burst his bubble, but if he has sex with someone else, even in front of you, that is technically expanding the lines of monogamy a bit. There are certainly people who have threesomes and call themselves monogamous, but you can’t deny there’s definitely a new person there!
As for the concerns about equality, you’ve come to the right place. I don’t think it’s necessary for you to also cuck him (that is, have sex with someone else in front of him) in order to be a respected equal in this relationship. When you spell that out in a sentence, it’s pretty uncontroversial, but as recently as two days ago I received an angry message on Twitter from a stranger about their issue with my “one penis policy.” This topic gets people very fired up.
One Penis Policies are real, and cause a lot of problems for those involved (I talked about them in greater detail on Elle Stanger’s Podcast, get it here). In case you’re new to the term, “OPP” refers to a situation where (typically) a cis man and cis woman open their relationship, and the man stipulates that the woman can only have extra-relational fun with other women, leaving him with the only penis in the equation. This of course can be rooted in misogyny or discounting the value of that woman’s queerness if she is queer, or limiting her sexual expression if she isn’t. It sucks!
But these issues come from somewhere and should be interrogated. I’d say of the men suggesting an OPP to their partners, about 10% are true assholes/FetLife Doms who are fully aware of the negative impact of the request and simply don’t care, and the other 90% is a mix of guys who have the potential to come around to the idea of an arrangement that better suits their partners after an open discussion, and people for whom non-monogamy is simply a bad idea and they should politely opt out.
And then there’s the people like myself who have consciously negotiated the form of non-monogamy that works for them, and who don’t feel oppressed by it. It is perfectly and 100% ok if your idea of non-monogamy is nothing but hot cucking scenes. It is ok if your idea of non-monogamy is living on a commune with your kitchen table polycule. Not everybody needs to be in the same format of relationship in order to be respected and loved. And I don’t need to go out and have sex with a bunch of people without my Dom there just because someone with 38 twitter followers told me to.
And by the way, not every third who’s going to be up for a negotiated and thoughtful cucking scene is going to want further commitment. Personally I find it a bit reductive and maybe a little prejudiced to assume that everyone (particularly women) is seeking commitment from sex. Sometimes it’s just sex.
But I digress (again). Because it’s very difficult to talk about cucking without talking about a bunch of related issues.
Here’s the deal:
Can your DD cuck you and stipulate that you can’t interact with the third while it’s happening?
Of course.
Can you agree to that stipulation?
As a consenting adult, you have every right to.
But the real question, at the end of the day, is whether this is something you truly want, or if it’s just something you think you should want in order to be a good sub and please your Dom.
If you don’t know the answer yet, I have a homework assignment for you so you can play around with the feelings that might arise from this situation without getting too risky.
Ask your DD to watch porn in front of you. Maybe across the room, maybe in a chair where you kneel at his feet, whatever feels appropriate to your dynamic. And you don’t get to touch him while it’s happening. Does this make you feel left out? Do you get a little pang of jealousy? If yes, good! That’s the point of this.
The next question is, how does that pang of jealousy make you feel? Does your body shut down and make you feel the need to safe word immediately? Is it uncomfy but interesting? Or does the jealousy layer over the arousal like hot sauce and make it all the more fun?
To be clear, these feelings are not a linear progression, one leading into the other the more “advanced” you get. I’ve been doing this for years and sometimes I feel all of the above over the course of one evening.
The point is, there’s a lot you can do to play with these themes without ever getting on the apps or inviting somebody into your home, and in my opinion you should thoroughly exhaust these options before actually playing with someone new. Not because I’m some kind of monogamy advocate, not at all, but because I want you to have a firm and open communication practice between the two of you before you invite a third into your dynamic and risk hurting that person’s feelings with a miscommunication in a scene (something I covered in the very first episode of the podcast). There’s no reason to jump into this headfirst immediately. A slow burn is delightful if you know how to curate it, and it will have you tingling with new relationship energy even without anybody new in the mix.
And by the way? This never has to exit the planning/fantasy stage. Because why? Because nobody has to do anything related to sex that they’re not into. Because of consent. You don’t have anything to prove. Just be you.
Also, just to address the equality thing one more time before I sign off, you do not need to cuck your Dom (or hook up with other people in whatever way) for this to be a respectful and fair dynamic. You can do that if that’s something you want to do, but there’s no one out there saying “this relationship is only healthy if you have sex with a certain amount of other people.” And if anyone is saying that to you, that is very weird and invasive and reductive.
D/s is the coming together of equals to exchange power consensually. The order of that sentence is very important. You are an equal not based on your actions but because of who you are and how you are thought of in this dynamic. The concept of measuring equality based on actions is, in my opinion, kind of capitalist but that’s another lengthy diatribe altogether. My point is, you are an equal to your Dom simply by being there. This reminds me a lot of the question of why subs get punished and Doms don’t. The answer? Because this is what the people in this dynamic have consented to. We don’t need to have or do the same things as each other to wrestle respect out of our partners. We can just be in the way that works for us.