Thoughts on Sex and Porn: Penis Size, Cuckolding, and Consent
I consume cuckold porn. Most of the blogs I follow have something to do with cuckolding, and I follow a lot of them, so I feel like I have a lot of familiarity with this world. Penis size is probably the most common theme in this kind of porn (secondary, of course, to the defining theme of the fetish: a man being confronted with his female partner’s infidelity). It’s not quite universal – there is a minority of cuckold porn that uses the apparent sexual inferiority of the man doing the cuckolding (bull) as a further source of humiliation for the cuckold (or cuck) – i.e. captions on pictures of women sucking small penises saying things like “your wife will suck any dick, as long as it’s not yours.” Even these captions seem to acknowledge that they’re not the norm – the wife is only sucking the small dick pictured because her standards are so low she’ll blow anyone. So while the large majority of cuckolding porn emphasizes the sexual superiority of the bull as the cause of the wife’s infidelity and/or a justification for it, even porn that inverts that dynamic tacitly assumes the greater desirability of large penises. “Bigger is better,” says this kind of porn, “and any woman who says otherwise is either lying or hasn’t had the experience to know that it’s true.”
What other things does that idea imply? It seems to depend on whom you ask. I’ve read some blogs run by people who seem to take the idea to extremes. These people – and there are examples from both sexes – hold the belief that having a small penis should be a defining feature of a man, that he should feel inferior in all matters, nonsexual included, because of his genitalia. Some people live the cuckolding “lifestyle” 24/7. Some couples have gone so far as to actually raise a child conceived by the woman with another man. Alternatively, for some, this is just a fun fantasy, and a safe, enjoyable way for people to indulge in certain deviant sexual feelings.
The maintenance of the latter attitude is considered imperative in most other kink and fetish circles. It’s generally known, for instance, that to have good and safe BDSM play, the actual real-life autonomy of all parties involved must be respected fully and unambiguously. That’s why there are safewords, and that’s why it’s good for participants to discuss their limits and expectations beforehand. But cuckolding emphasizes this much less frequently. For every couple who love each other and respect each other while engaging in the fetish, there’s someone for whom a literal lack of consent on the part of the cuck is the ideal situation.
I believe it has to do with our concepts of traditional masculinity and femininity that come from a traditionally patriarchal society. While these roles have obvious implications in the subjugation of women into mother/homemaker roles, their other implications are sometimes harder to see. One of the implications is the idealization of the most extreme versions of what is perceived to be masculine. This leads to fear and conflict in men who perceive themselves to not live up to these standards.
How does this work in practice? Men are given conflicting messages by society – on the one hand, they are told on a surface level that all people are equal even if they’re not the same, and that this is also true of all men. At the same time, they are given incessant implicit and explicit messages about what being an ideal man is – the ideal man is tall, hung, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, muscular, strong, intelligent, suave, confident, tan, dominant, fearless, and unflappable.
Combine this with America’s obsession with individual competition, and what you get is an environment where men who don’t fully live up to the ideal (the vast majority of men) are made to feel insecure about their own body, personality, and general vibe. But at the same time, fear and insecurity are regarded as unmanly, so these men feel the need to either bury them or act out in ways that they think reaffirm their masculinity. However, these efforts to reclaim masculine confidence are themselves precarious because the ideal man doesn’t have to try to be manly, he just is. So, a lack of insecurity is almost unattainable, yet the act of being insecure and trying to stop being insecure already means already game over.
Culturally, we don’t sympathize with these men’s experiences because we have been taught that we are not supposed to, that they are weak and unmanly for having any feelings that do not directly correlate to domination in some way, and that they should be embarrassed and ashamed. This is the phenomenon by which the act of oppression or subjugation (in this case, along lines of sex and gender) dehumanizes the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
It is this toxic mix which gives rise to the prevalence of cuckolding blogs who actively and seriously champion non-consensual cuckolding: a conception of masculinity that leaves exactly no space for vulnerability, a society that impresses upon us a narrowly defined male ideal, and a dehumanization of all involved: of men into self-assured dominators and women into simpering submissives just waiting to be activated by the right man (with the right dick).
We are socialized to hold all of this in our minds, but then we are told that we just need to be our authentic selves, and that everyone’s a winner. I think people’s interest in cuckolding is often a reaction to these conflicting messages: there’s a taboo in the act of deciding that actually, it isn’t what’s on the inside that counts, it’s the superficial characteristics that we’ve been both socialized implicitly to venerate and socialized explicitly to reject. The perfect example of this is, of course, a man’s penis: something whose main purpose is sex, and which, unlike intelligence, charisma, or physique, the man simply cannot improve upon by willpower and dedication. Something completely surface-level. So regardless of how much size matters on a physical level, in the cuckolding fetish it has a layered and constructed meaning that influences why it’s part of what turns people on.
In other words: why are we kinky? Society.
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