In case you thought that wasn’t the kind of thing Scientific American should be publishing—well, you’re wrong. In 2024, America’s oldest continuously published scientific magazine, founded in 1845 and which has published over 200 Nobel Prize winners, including Albert Einstein, is proudly in favor of men letting their wives and girlfriends have sex with other men.
“Here’s What the ‘Manosphere’ Gets Wrong about Cuckoldry,” says Brooke Scelza, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Scelza wants us to know that our negative ideas about cuckoldry are rooted in misogyny and cultural ignorance. Rightwingers and “redpillers” may think being a “cuck” is a bad thing and laugh and point their fingers, but really it’s quite the opposite when you start to look abroad and back in time.
The professor writes, “Cross-cultural studies of cuckoldry reveal that men are not necessarily being tricked; they may also advocate for cuckoldry when it suits their interests." The manosphere depicts “cuckolds” as hapless suckers duped by cunning women, a picture that fuels misogynistic rhetoric and shields men from accountability for their words and actions. But anthropologists have shown that paternity and fatherhood are malleable concepts that both women and men have used to their advantage.
Far from being hapless dupes, men often use cuckoldry to their benefit in non-Western cultures, in ways that make them anything but the “beta males” derided by pick-up artists, masculinity gurus and incels. In many cultures around the world, they simply don’t think about paternity in the terms that we do. It doesn’t matter to, say, the Himba cattle-herders of Namibia if women have multiple lovers at the same time because men do too, and “access to extramarital partners… can strengthen male alliances.” In cultures where the notion of “partible paternity” obtains, for instance in South America, any man who has sex with a woman around the time of her pregnancy has a claim to be the father of the children, and this actually creates incentives for children to have multiple “fathers,” since that means access to more protection and greater resources. And children with more protection and greater resources are more likely to survive.
So there: open your mind, chud—and your relationship too.
Commentators on Twitter, perceptive bunch, noted that Scientific American’s defence of cuckoldry came hot on the heels of its endorsement of Kamala Harris, only the second time the journal has ever openly supported a candidate for president. Could there be a link?
Indeed there could. The Harris-Walz campaign has made emasculation a central part of its platform. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month, men actually lined up outside the convention center to have themselves sterilised at a mobile Planned Parenthood clinic. You probably remember this. On the first day of the Convention, the clinic offered free vasectomies, and then on the second day, abortions. Ten men got the snip, apparently.
A vasectomy is now a political gesture. There was a significant uptick in sterilizations, among both sexes, after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, in 2022. According to The Guardian, a vasectomy is now “a way for men to take a more active stake in big decisions about contraception and reproduction that typically fall to women.” It’s a way for liberal men to express solidarity with women, whose “reproductive rights” are under threat from conservatives and “MAGA extremists.”
Inside this year’s convention, attendees and viewers were told the party needs to lean in to a new kind of masculinity. CNN’s Dana Bash contrasted the testosterone-soaked proceedings at the Republican National Convention—which included Hulk Hogan ripping off his t-shirt, in classic style, to reveal a Trump-Vance tee, and shouting “LET TRUMPAMANIA RUN WILD, BROTHER!”—with the less bombastic behavior of Democrat men like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff.
Bash said the Democrats are “trying to put forward male figures—Tim Walz being one of them, Doug Emhoff last night—who can speak to men out there who might not be the testosterone-laden, gun-toting kind of guy who wants to listen to Hulk Hogan and the kind of players that came out of the RNC; but also, in addition, understand that it’s okay, in 2024, to be a man comfortable in his own skin who supports a woman. And that’s something that they’re really trying to work on with male voters beyond the base.”
When the trailer for the Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men was released in early 2022, liberals denied tooth and claw that testosterone decline is happening or that it’s a matter of political importance. “This is gay,” hummed a chorus of commentators and talking-heads from Stephen Colbert and Joy Behar to George Takei and Cenk Uyghur, all hellbent on discouraging young men from taking control of their lives, meeting other like-minded young men and getting in shape and having fun together. Now, two years later, Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media are telling us that not only is testosterone decline real, it’s essential to ensure the election of America’s first female president—and a black female president, at that.
What a difference a couple of years can make.
But there’s a deeper point to be made here about the relationship between leftism and emasculation. The destruction of traditional family structures is the sine qua non of leftist social and cultural revolution, and has been since the birth of modern leftism, with the French Revolution. The founding documents of Marxism, written in the nineteenth century, make it crystal clear the communist utopia can only be built on the rubble of all the structures of bourgeois life, including, perhaps most importantly, the nuclear family.
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, first published in 1884, Friedrich Engels claimed that human societies all had their origin in “primitive matriarchies.” In these early classless societies, there was no property: everything was held in common, mating was “promiscuous”—which means exactly what you’d think—and women, by retaining total control over their reproductive function, actually had the upper hand over men. The arrival of property and the first class society was also the arrival of the first patriarchy, because women became the property (of men). Class society is patriarchy, and vice versa. The overthrow of one will be, must be, the overthrow of the other. Engels left the full implications of his argument in The Origin to be developed by others, but he clearly suggests that the future communist societies would, in some real sense, be primitive matriarchies again.
All of these claims were pretty hokey, and the stuff about primitive matriarchies was based on some very tenuous early anthropology that was hard to defend then and impossible to defend now. Nobody has ever found compelling evidence for the existence of matriarchal societies. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that this theory was accepted by leftist revolutionaries, and its arguments about the relationship between gender and domination became standard presuppositions.
The bourgeois nuclear family is simply the latest manifestation of the class-based patriarchal control of women and their bodies. And so, for the last 140 years, Marxists and the movements Marxism gave birth to, including the second and subsequent “waves” of feminism, have done their very best to undermine the nuclear family however they can. The encouragement of “promiscuous” mating has been one means to this end. This is why cuckoldry—or “polyamory” or whatever they call it—really matters to the left today: because it undermines, yet further, the nuclear family, and therefore capitalism and class society.
Seen from this perspective, Scientific American’s endorsement of cuckoldry is far more than a commitment to the Harris-Walz vision of masculinity: it’s a commitment to the destruction of the patriarchy and capitalism, which means the world as we know it.
So if science is now for cucks, that’s anything but a laughing matter.
