Letters to the Editor
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Um, well, no
A number of years ago somebody at my work asked me what the female equivalent of cuckold was mainly because I know a lot of words. I ran across a fair number of pretty interesting websites before I asked Merriam Webster who gave me cuckquean and gave me the citation from some famous author whose name I don't remember from the early 20th century.
However comma I would not call Suzanne Craig a cuckquean any more than I would call a guy whose woman is having it off with some other female a cuckold. Cuckold has nothing to do with homosexual behavior. It has everything to do with the fact that when a child is born, you know for sure who the mother is but the father may be a dicier thing. The word comes, of course, from the behavior of the cuckoo bird where the female lays her eggs in another bird's nest which is purely heterosexual. I always found the inversion amusing. The female bird doesn't know whose eggs she's sitting on but the male doesn't know whose child his woman has. But presumably the woman does.
I would say that any woman who's been cheated on by her man with another female is a cuckquean.
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Some alternates for female cuckold
Chickold?
Tragi-gal?
Medea?
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Suzanne Craig is where I'm going to draw the line.
Larry Craig is a hypocrite and a fool, and easily the current Republican poster child for appallingly bad judgment. Soliciting for public sex is outright wrong, no matter the object of the solicitation, and that's easily doubled when the "solicitor" is a sitting Senator. He deserves the opprobrium he gets, and get it he will.
All that said, I'm in favor of leaving his wife and family alone to the greatest extent possible. Her only bad judgment came in marrying him, and being adopted by him is something the kids likely had little if any say in, so for all of them I have very little to say.
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Agree with others ... Mrs. Craig is no more a cuckold than Hillary Clinton ... they are both the spouses of men who have
embarrassed them by their (alleged) sexual conduct...
It hate this subject ... I thought it had died a thousand deaths in the interminable discussions of what sort of woman Mrs. Gary Condit must be to have stood by HER husband despite years of alleged infidelity and worse ...
Maybe it's love, respect, the realization that life with this person is better than life without him ... is it too bad most of us will never know such a marriage? ...
God only knows what Suzanne Craig knows, knew, felt or feels ... the implication is that she was somehow "deceived" and is therefore a "victim" ... and that she has assumed some new cliched identity as the "supportive spouse" ... what? because a "real women" would have kicked him to the curb?
shameful.
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How about "fool"?
While distaff words are all well and good, you have to wonder about the wives of holier-than-thou moralists. What do they say to one another? It's too late for Mrs. Larry Craig to talk to the former Mrs. Jim Bakker, but she could still talk to Mrs. David Vitter or any of the ever-increasing number of wives (and the occasional husband) of those who were caught out-and-out lying to them while trying to pass laws that they are transgressing. Mark Foley is an example, and Florida Rep. Bob Allen another.
The right wing women came down hard on Hillary Clinton (if you'll pardon the imagery), notably Mrs. Vitters. Now that they have been shown to be fools, are they going to apologize to her or are they going to ask her advice? After all, as a previous letter writer defined the term, Bill didn't cuckold Hillary. It wasn't "sex" in the "possibility of offspring" sense of the word. By that definition, the Unresigned Sen. Craig didn't cuckold his wife either. Ah, the finer points of language.
I'll stick to calling Suzanne Craig a "conservative idiot" or, to remove the redundancy, a "fool".
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I don't know anything about these real people, the Craigs,
but here's some speculation to add to the pile, and I am going to pick on them a bit as my example, even tho we don't know them (despite knowing more than we ever wanted to).
What if she knew full well he was gay, and the marriage is covering her secret, too? Let's not confuse "cuckquean" with "beard", or "willing participant".
I know, this is something that one usually reads evil people saying about Hillary. Forget that, it's stupid. The last thing a lesbian would want to be fake-married to is a panting hounddog. (Egads, what if she were the only woman left in the house after a particularly drunken fundraiser?!)
But just in the Craig situation, they were hastily married 24 years ago after the news broke in the papers that Mr. Craig might be gay. Rumors, sudden marriage. You don't think she was in on that?
And why would she (or any woman in this sitch) go along with it? Perhaps there is money arriving in an offshore account every month to bank against this day. Or perhaps she has don't-touch-me issues because of trauma or some such, and is perfectly fine being a beard. Or perhaps she's a lesbian.
Perhaps "game face, game face," is "oh god, don't look my way next!"
Or maybe she knew because she sat up with him one night while he cried and they talked about it and she really feels for him and promised to be his friend and try to help him cover it up? I mean, let's not leave out plain old compassion for someone that you've lived with for 24 years.
I just wouldn't always assume the wife was unwittingly "cheated on", which is what a cuckold is (the other poster was right, it's about not knowing the parentage of your kids, being lied to). That's actually assuming these women are dumb as stumps and unable to see their marriage rationally.
Although that happens, the blind cheat, but you can tell when it does, by the jewelry. The ones who really got cheated on sport $4 million eight-carat, purple diamond rings, like Mrs. Kobe Bryant, who can hardly lift up her arm.
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I think I have it
Well, in France at least, if not still around here, I think the term you are looking for is "wife".