14th February 2026: Cuck Dialectics and The Subordinate
this one is about the dialectics of getting cucked, vague psychoanalytic gesturing, and Kallie’s The Subordinate. creds to L— for fucking almost everyone i’m dating. creds also to GDE for telling me i’m structurally monogamous and “just getting off on the negation” which sparked this whole thing, and to them, F—, S—, canmom, and my flatmate for talking thru some of my thoughts with me. anyway!
No Really: What the Fuck is a Cuck?
Let’s start with an inadequate definition: being a cuck is when your partner sleeps with someone who isn’t you. This gets at something relating to being cuckolded inasmuch as that’s generally what happens when someone is cucked, but “generally” and “something relating to” isn’t good enough for the purposes of this essay. We wouldn’t call someone who goes to a swingers club to wife-swap a cuck. (Well, maybe some people would, but I think that’s them projecting their own insecurities onto another dynamic.) Similarly, we might call someone with no partner who gets off on the object of their affections being sexually satisfied by someone else a cuck.
Okay, so let’s shift the goalposts a bit and also edit our definition. What the fuck’s a cuck in the sense of a cuckolding kink? Maybe being a cuck is someone who gets off on other people sleeping together – except that’s akin to being a voyeur. Maybe being a cuck is the fetishisation of infidelity – except again, the no partner counter-example messes this definition up. Maybe it’s something about jealousy? We’re more on the right track, but jealousy seems more emergent than foundational in terms of how the fetish works. Like, sure, let’s say a cuck is someone who eroticises jealousy, we can start there, or at least we can shift the goalposts again and focus on the kinds of cucks who do eroticise jealousy.
So, maybe a cuck is someone who eroticises jealousy. That’s not how we’re defining a cuck per se but it is characteristic of the cuckold. This makes it sound a lot less rosy than the Oh Joy Sex Toy comic makes it out to be. Fortunately, the UK’s pre-eminent erotic mind control author, Kallidora Rho, has got us covered with something more substantive to pick apart. For the overly intellectual cuck’s palate, may I recommend…
The Subordinate
Released as a serial over the course of 2025, The Subordinate is a story about the classic cuck triad. Mousy, workaholic Olive hires her old bully, Ivy Robinson to be her assistant. With the help of a magic potion, Ivy exploits Olive’s feelings and leverages workaholic tendencies to sleep with Olive’s girlfriend Luna. The story crescendos as Olive uses the potion against Ivy, only to reinforce Ivy’s domination of her life. The epilogue is of Olive and Luna’s wedding, Ivy acting as Olive’s bridesmaid and the true recipient of Luna’s vows. Ivy also remarks that Olive sister is hot – which is important for the framework I’m going to be describing.
So, what we’ve got here is a triad of a bull (Ivy), a wife (Luna), and a cuck (Olive). This is also the triad presented in the aforementioned OJST comic, but everything is notably more awful – no pastel pinks and declarations of “I’m proud to be a cuck!” In fact, Olive stops using a capital-I at all in her narration, moving to slashspeak for her relationship with her Bull. Okay, I’m doing the italicised terms thing, which I use to refer to something with a specified, self-consistent definition across the essay. These three terms, in the sense that I am using them here, are relative positions in a triad: the cuck and the wife are in a Relationship (capital-R here to make clear this is the abstracted idea of what their relation means [see ANTI-PROTOCOL when that comes out]). The bull seems to possess the wife. And finally, there’s whatever is going on between the cuck and the bull – we’ll get to that soon.
Just to make clear at this point: while wife is a clearly gendered position, anyone can be a wife. Whether a man in the role of wife becomes a woman is something for the second-wave feminists among us to discuss. (“Yes” is the answer, for what it’s worth.)
So what is the affective experience of Olive during all this? After her first time watching Ivy fuck Luna, she notes “[a] fresh wave of jealousy and insecurity”. Earlier, during Ivy and Luna’s first sexual escapade for which Olive is stuck at work, she fantasises about what it must be like, remarking, “Jealousy rises inside me at the very thought, green and monstrous, matched only by my acute, overbearing sense of insecurity and inadequacy.” The jealousy is definitely present here, eroticised by the general tone of the narration, the fact that Olive thanks Ivy for “stealing [her] girlfriend”. But the eroticisation doesn’t seem to be of the jealousy itself, more a response to cope with the feelings of jealousy. And what’s this about “insecurity”, concurrent with both mentions of jealousy? This all stems from the “stealing” of Luna by Ivy. In other words, jealousy and insecurity emerge from the negation of the cuck-wife Relationship.
Let’s not be too hasty with our analysis now. Luna doesn’t even meet Ivy until the third chapter, and the way these stories work, there’s a similar sort of erotic tension and release with every update. When Ivy first puts the magic potion in Olive’s coffee and starts relaying to her what a loser she is, Olive is forced to reckon with her attraction to Ivy:
She’s so superior to me. Every part of her I look at isn’t just a source of arousal. It’s a point of comparison. And everywhere, I come up short.
It’s a double-edged sword. But the gnawing insecurity just spurs me on.
This is right. This is how I belong. A spectator. Inferior.
There’s that “insecurity” again. However, that insecurity “spurs [Olive] on.” In fact, Olive’s Identity (capital-I for abstract self-identification) is immediately reaffirmed as “[a] spectator.” Ivy only vaguely knows about the existence of Luna at this point (not even by name), and already Olive is recognisable as a cuck. The first erotic interaction between the two culminates in Olive sending Ivy some undefined large sum of money.
So perhaps here is where we can examine the cuck-bull relationship without reference to the wife. Clearly, there’s something going on, but no one would mistake this exchange of money for Olive being Ivy’s sugar mommy. Effectively, Olive and Ivy have entered into a Domme/sub dynamic, but this isn’t turned into a Relationship. Ivy even says to Olive, “I’m a main character. You’re a…[sic] a sidekick… If that.” What’s important here is that Olive isn’t Ivy’s sidekick. She is also only maybe a sidekick. As a spectator, she is defined by her own non-relation to Ivy. This is again reinforced when Olive gives Ivy head and is so bad at it that she immediately redefines herself as “something infinitely lower than a cocksucker. A hole.” She further states, “Ivy won’t even permit me to suck her cock. I’m just a hole.” This denial of the service that Olive is providing for Ivy, even while Olive is providing that service (because getting your face fucked is actually difficult and active work, as I know personally), is the disavowal of the cuck-bull Relationship. What’s curious here is that the cuck’s Identity is still seemingly based on her relation to the bull.
What we have then is two modes of cuckoldry. One where insecurity stems from the negation of the cuck-wife Relationship, which we can term “wife-centred cuckoldry”, and one where insecurity stems from the disavowal of the cuck-bull Relationship, which we can term “bull-centred cuckoldry”. Let’s examine the function of eroticisation in each of these modes in turn.
Wife-Centred Cuckoldry
So, when we press further into examining The Subordinate through the lens of wife-centred cuckoldry, we might contend that Olive is already a cuck from the outset. If wife-centred cuckoldry is where insecurity stems from the negation of the cuck-wife Relationship, then we can observe Olive and Luna’s relationship already being negated by Olive’s job. She works late, and this working late is causing relationship issues. In the first chapter, we are witness to this exchange:
“They work you too hard, I swear.” A little laugh, mostly to conceal the fact that it’s not ‘them’ she’s unhappy with.
“Sorry, Luna,” I offer eventually.
“It’s OK. You… gotta do what you gotta do, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We should really do something romantic soon. Something intimate. It’s… it’s been a while.” It sounds like more of an ultimatum than she means it to.
This force of negativity on the Relationship serves as the substrate for the story as a whole. One of Ivy’s functions in the story is to add pressure to this force until something changes in the Relationship. This is why Olive takes Luna to go to a bar with Ivy even before Luna has any real interest. The alternative is an eventual break-up.
Through this lens, Ivy could really be anyone. We can recognise when we want to hook-up with someone or see a partner and there are blockages in the way. We might exclaim we’ve been cucked by Avanti West Coast when our train from Glasgow to London is cancelled, or we’ve been cucked by a nation-wide scabies outbreak when us and our partners have to all quarantine for a few weeks. There is no bull in any substantive sense of the word, just a force of negativity on our Relationship. In this way, wife-centred cuckoldry does not rely on a bull to be legible.
Without a bull, how then is a cuck a cuck? In a non-cucked Relationship, one might deal with this force of negativity by reaffirming the commitment to the Relationship, for example by proposing to one’s long distance girlfriend. Similarly, in non-cucked polyamorous Relationships, these blockages and supposed infidelities are not a force of negativity on the Relationship, which might be defined outwith a commitment to see each other in a timely manner or for exclusivity. For a cuck, the negation of their Relationship is itself negated by eroticising the force of negativity.
We can observe this in a dynamic where a wife is unfaithful, but not with a person-in-specific. A cuck may be jacking off at work to the thought of her wife at home, being fucked by someone she doesn’t know but does know about. Eroticisation in this way shores up the cuck’s Identity as a cuck and as such, shores up the Relationship with the wife, because to be cucked (through this lens) one has to have a wife. The jealousy and insecurity are emergent features of the force negativity on the Relationship. We can think of insecurity as the feeling of non-Identity since Identities both constitutes and are constituted by Relationships. (See Sex, or the Unbearable for further discussion on this one.) As such, this insecurity is unbearable and has to be resolved, either through breaking up, reaffirming commitment, or eroticising the negation itself.
At the end of the The Subordinate, this negation of the negation plays out in Olive being wed to Luna. Their Relationship is reified through the act of marriage and Olive’s Identity is secured. The only mention of jealousy in the final chapter is when Luna’s bridesmaids are lusting after her. This security by way of eroticising (negating) negativity is also found in the OJST comic, where the wife remarks, “I feel CLOSER [sic] to Joe when I’m cuckolding him.”
A final question remains about what separates the wife from the cuck in this lens. Why is it that we read Olive as already a cuck rather than Luna? The distinction between these is one of possession. Inasmuch as the wife is taken from the cuck, the cuck possesses the wife. We can see this as Olive remarks on Ivy “stealing” Luna and notes the marks Ivy leaves on Luna with her “possessive teeth”. This amounts to Olive’s revelation, “Luna will never be mine again.” However, this phrasing is effectively a trick of the light. Something must be possessed in order to be taken. Olive has permanent ownership of Luna through their marriage, and must do in perpetuity for Luna to continually be given away. The one-way nature of this possession is made clear in the narrative when Olive remarks, “I really am about to lose her”, while she herself is the one effectively doing the cheating. This sense of possession is present even without a bull since it is Luna who makes the “ultimatum”-esque request to Olive in the first chapter.
To sum up, wife-centred cuckolding is negating the force of negativity on a Relationship defined by a one-way possession of the wife by the cuck through the eroticisation of that negativity. This process involves the cuck moving through jealousy and insecurity to Identifying with their own inadequacy in the Relationship, which effectively saves the Relationship. However, this mode of cucking is possible only so long as the wife isn’t diminished as an object to possess and Relate to by her infidelity or otherwise.
Bull-Centred Cuckoldry
If wife-centred cucking does not rely on a bull to be legible as cucking, is the same true of the inverse? That is: Does bull-centred cucking necessarily involve a wife? Here we can turn to Olive’s early relationship with Ivy. First, let’s recall how earlier we noted that the cuck-bull Relationship was disavowed, even though the cuck’s Identity is formed in relation to the bull. This doesn’t seem to square then with our earlier comments about the non-Identity arising from a non-Relationship being unbearable. How then does the cuck’s Identity operate in this case?
In the first two chapters, the erotic tension and release between Olive and Ivy is not about Luna, but instead about money. Both these chapters involve Olive sending Ivy her textually hard-earned money because Ivy will “spend it better.” Olive in both these chapters forms her Identity in relation to Ivy, but because she cannot out-and-out say that she is Ivy’s sub or Ivy’s sexual-partner or anything that would affirm a Relationship between them, Olive’s Identification is with what Ivy has and she herself lacks. We see this again in the “main character” / “sidekick” distinction. Ivy gets “character development” while Olive is “still the same girl [she was] in college”. As such, Olive casts both herself and Ivy in Relation to the same things. What these “same things” are is dynamic and contextual throughout the story. In the first two chapters, this is money. In the latter chapters, this is also Luna, Olive’s management job (which she loses to Ivy partway through the story), and Olive’s sister Alyssa.
So we have a roundabout form of Identity for the cuck and the bull because of the disavowal of their Relationship, but not a reason why this disavowal happens. To explain this, we can observe how it is repeatedly emphasised that Ivy is going to “take everything” from Olive. This is something that cannot come about in the context of a Relationship between Ivy and Olive directly. If Ivy and Olive were in a Relationship, anything taken by Ivy would still be possessed by Olive through their shared Identity as part of the Relationship. For example, if I gave my boyfriend money and he bought himself a watch, I would have a boyfriend who has a nice watch: the sense of the watch’s possession still ultimately lies with me inasmuch as I can possess my boyfriend. This is why, for Ivy to “take everything”, she must disavow the Relationship.
Let us weave together these two threads: the Relationship is disavowed as a way for the bull to substantively take from the cuck, and the cuck and bull are Identified with their Relationship with what is taken to substitute for a direct cuck-bull Relationship. This process positivises a wife in bull-centred cucking. Effectively, the money, the job, and Alyssa all fulfil the same characteristics of the wife in our wife-centred cucking framework; the difference here is that these come into focus as a wife spontaneously rather than being pre-existent. Alyssa only becomes an object to possess, a “wedding gift”, when Ivy expresses her interest to Olive. The Relationship is emergent as a function of the bull’s desire to possess and the cuck’s ability to fulfil that possession.
In this way, the wife is created from nothing because that is what the cuck-bull dynamic revolves around. This then generates the cuck’s erotic desire for the wife to be taken by the bull because that ensures the cuck’s Identity (thus saving her from insecurity) in this roundabout Relation to the bull. This idea of taking and possession is again a trick of the light – Olive has to have money to transfer it to Ivy – but now the operative part of the possession now is that there is someone distinct to do the taking: a bull. What the bull takes isn’t relevant, only that she takes it from the cuck. This mode of cucking is then possible only so long as the cuck has something to take.
Dialectic Cuckoldry
In The Subordinate, we are not actually presented with two distinct plot threads of Olive saving her relationship with Luna and separately Olive losing everything to Ivy. Instead, we are given a portrayal of these two modes of cucking at once. The question here is are these two modes so complementary that they only overlap – that is, does the cuck get off on losing her wife and separately get off on the bull taking whatever she wants (including the wife) – or is there some kind of dialectic synthesis taking place where these two modes interact?
At the climax of The Subordinate, before the wedding, Olive uses the magic potion against Ivy. We haven’t really discussed the magic potion in this essay but it doesn’t really matter. Effectively, it gives one the power to be convincing. In classic erotic mind control fashion, it only really brings out latent urges within the characters. This is made apparent in Ivy’s reticence to follow Olive’s commands under the influence of the potion, while Olive readily agrees to everything Ivy has to say. However, outwith Ivy’s reticence, the thing that stops Olive assuming the dominant role is her feelings of guilt:
[Ivy] has infected my sense of right and wrong completely. What I know doesn’t matter. What I feel is all-important—and what I feel is that violating her this way is unforgivable. It produces the same sense of revulsion as contemplating committing a murder. The gnawing guilt, the itching fear that, at any moment, I will be somehow discovered, that my superior will catch me in the act and force me back to my knees, all the lower for having so insolently forgotten my place.
This is complemented by a reversal of tack. Olive, instead of asserting her dominance against Ivy, ends up reaffirming Ivy’s dominance against her. This on the back of her realisation that without Ivy, her life is “meaningless.” Even though she “had Luna”, she states:
[Luna was the] one I let down over and over again, even before I pushed her into Ivy’s arms. The one I always disappointed, because I couldn’t help staying late at work. The one I offered only comfort, never excitement. Never passion.
This scene culminates on Olive telling Ivy, “i [sic]… am your perfect victim”, and that this ruination and theft must go on “forever.”
What we can glean from all this is that finally, Olive has achieved some permanent Relationship with Ivy. Whereas in the bull-cuck dynamic, the wife is tenuously created, only so long as the cuck has something to lose to the bull (for example, once Olive loses her job, she actually can’t give it away any more), now there is a permanent commitment to the dynamic of this loss. This, in turn, can only be fulfilled by a wife of the wife-centred framework, because that is the one thing which the cuck always possesses. This then amends the sense of “meaningless” non-Identity Olive felt being inadequate to Luna, fulfuling the promise and security of Identity in one act.
There is an interesting additional dimension to the erotic energy at play here. The chapter we have been discussing fixates heavily on Olive’s guilt, which she is entirely absolved of by the time of the wedding. What has occurred as a result of this permanent union between cuck, bull, and wife, is that each of Olive, Ivy, and Luna have become entirely composed of ego, superego, and id respectively. Ivy has “infected [Olive’s] sense of right and wrong completely.” When Olive remarks that her “superior will catch me in the act”, this is equates her superego with Ivy, referred to as “superior” throughout the text. This effectively creates a Masochistic contract between between Ivy and Olive (see Coldness & Cruelty), complicated by its disavowal by the bull and mediation through the wife.
Dialectic cuckoldry is defined by a sort of perpetual motion machine. The wife never loses value as an object in the cuck’s possession because she is continually positivised by the disavowed bull-cuck Relationship. Similarly, the disavowed bull-cuck Relationship is made permanent by focussing on the continual taking of the cuck’s one infinite resource: her wife. Whereas wife-centred and bull-centred cuckoldry are both tenuous structures, dialectic cuckoldry is stable.
From Theory to Praxis
Moving away from our close reading of The Subordinate, we can think about these different forms of cuckoldry in actual life. Obviously I have an investment in this framework, myself being a massive cuck, but also I’ve been the bull and the wife even if cuck is the role I play most right now. If we want to get a bit feminist with it (which we always do), we can contend that there is an element of structural monogamy to wife-centred and dialectic cuckoldry. The Relationship based on possession, whether that’s mutual or otherwise, and the expectation of exclusivity which is being negated is definitionally monogamous. Even when people have multiple of these types of Relationships, they are engaging in simultaneous monogamies (see Monogamous Mind, Polyamorous Terror).
As a (non-)committed relationship anarchist, I can only really get off on bull-centred cucking. When my flatmate or the people I’m dating sleep with other people, it doesn’t faze me. The way I relate to my friends and lovers isn’t possessive. What does hit right for me though is when the thirty year-old woman who bullies me at the community events we co-run makes me give up the front seat in the car for her or she takes my soup at the ramen place or she fucks my boyfriend who then tells me how good it was – all for her to tell me she’s not thinking about me at all. That makes me hot just writing it actually. Any sense of possession, however, is spontaneous and temporary. Monogamous sensibilities become something to play with rather than live within.
I think that’s an important aspect to this all: to acknowledge it explicitly as play. While Olive, Ivy, and Luna all seem happy by the end, The Subordinate does not contend with what happens after the wedding (see my own UNTITLED LEATHERSEX STORY #2 for an exploration of moving beyond the high point of erotic rapture in a cuck-bull-wife triad). There is mention that Luna is pregnant with Ivy’s child, which Olive is expected to raise, but in the real world, the birth of a child would break apart the triad immediately. When we reify our Identities as cuck, bull, wife, or whatever, we a turning away from an insistent reality that we are all actually still people. Our agency can never be fully disavowed. Our urges can never be fully kept in check. Our conscience can never disappear completely.
Even with her affected coldness, the woman who bullies me has still held me while I’ve cried.