#003 DOOMSCROLLING IN THE CUCK CHAIR

Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 19th century, a specific form of punishment was derived for “scolds” – (mostly) women who gossiped, talked too loudly, or were otherwise deemed social nuisances. These scolds were strapped, typically in a town square, to a “cucking stool,” which was a specially designed chair meant to publicly humiliate the accused, or to dunk them in water (which is also referred to as a ducking chair).

The work “cuck” originally referenced the sound made by the cuckoo bird, perhaps equating the pitch of a gossiping woman’s voice to that of the animal, but today it is pretty much never used to describe this noise. The cuck, in our contemporary zeitgeist, actually rarely refers to a woman at all. Most commonly, the modern day cuck is a passive man who enjoys watching his partner engage in sexual intercourse with another person, while he watches from across the room. The traces of humiliation are still present here, but the gendered connotations are completely different. This is not to say that women can’t be cucks, but the word’s cultural associations have drifted in the other direction. No longer does the act of cucking represent the silencing of an outspoken woman, but rather, the societal push and pull between masculinity and vulnerability, soft power often asserted by the female partner.

Have you ever stayed in a hotel and noticed that, across from the bed, there is often a singular chair, sometimes leather, sometimes carpeted, that seems oddly dysfunctional in relation to the other furniture in the room? This, my dear readers, is the modern cucking stool. The cuck chair, for short.

The act of cucking is highly performative, and involves a commitment to the staging of bodies not unlike the choreography of a theater production. It takes a lot to get three people in a room to carry out such roles, and perhaps even more precarious is the aftermath of such an ordeal. Creating this space, entering it, and exiting it – each presents its own challenge…

...which is what the LMC trio learned a few weeks ago during our foray into an experience we would like to call intellectual cucking.

Before proceeding, I would like to remind you all of one of the key tenants of Project 2026:

In the spirit of facilitating this ideology, how shall we expect ourselves to be welcomed into the homes of strangers without also opening our own homes?

It was January 3rd, 2026 when we decided to practice what we preach.

By now you know the drill: Lam, Mathilde, and I assemble in Mathilde’s bedroom and open our app-which-shall-still-remain-nameless.

We were honestly just really hungry and hoping someone would DoorDash us a meal. Our chat log with various matches looks something like:

omg we’re so hungry rn

we’re soooooo hungry

so hungry and sick in bed rn :((((((

ugh wish we had food rnnnnnnn

We sit around the phone waiting for a ping. A few men respond, offering to bring us dinner or take us out right away, but at this point we are a bit sleepy and resigned to the bedroom for the night.

My favorite point of negotiation in this situation is to say that we’re all somehow sick in bed at the same time and unfortunately can’t go out tonight but would definitely love to once we all recover, but also we’re completely immobilized and starving and incapable of getting up to find food for ourselves at the moment.

If all goes to plan, they will offer to order us something with little to no hassle, and our celebrations can commence.

We were throwing out these lines to our most recent pings when we come across a 27 year old PhD student who says: “lol I’m too broke to buy y’all food but maybe I can cook something?”

Now, this isn’t the first we’ve had a man offer to cook for us, but something about his honesty and earnestness to provide such service struck us, and we decided to shoot back an offer of our own:

“Can you come over and defend your thesis for us?”

For reasons I can’t quite pin down, we were all very interested in the fact that, according to his bio, he was pursuing his doctorate – perhaps because each of us has been flirting with the idea of grad school to varying degrees of seriousness. I myself am quite set on it, so I was curious to know his experience.

He responds back: “like a panel or something?”

“Yes.”

We give him a fake phone number we use through Google Voice to remain anonymous. He texts us saying he’s in the Valley and just got done watching Marty Supreme with a friend. He asks to call us.

The task of talking to him on the phone is deferred to a fourth friend in the room who boldly paves the path for us – at this time we had never talked to any of these men on the phone before (we have since gotten over our fear of this). She calmly organizes the details and tells him he can come over to Mathilde’s so long as he is prepared to explain his thesis in detail with visual aids when necessary. He just says “wow I’m so high right now but I’ll be on my way.”

So, it’s not quite DoorDash…but we hope that this experience will at least feed us mentally.

We prepare Mathilde’s living room for his arrival. It’s relatively sparsely furnished and open, so we use this to our advantage to create some space between us and him. We organize a couple of chairs around the couch so that all four of us can sit conference style across from him. As for his seat, we choose a leather and wood armchair, and place it on the other side of the room.

Very quickly we all realize what we’ve done: we’ve just set up a cuck chair for this man.

We debate if we should change the orientation of the room so as to dispel any sexual connotations, but we decide to keep it because, well, it’s really funny.

When he arrives we are all well prepared to judge his intellect. I have my laptop out with a fresh Google Doc open to take notes.

After some awkward introductions, he timidly takes his seat. He says that he’s actually not even close to being done with his thesis and still has a lot of research to do. We back up a bit and ask what the hell he’s even studying.

Bronze Age pastoral nomads in Kazakhstan. Awesome.

We tell him to begin, start from the beginning, and spare no details. He begins by asking the audience if any of us are familiar at all with the Bronze Age. Mathilde is a history major so she flexes some knowledge on him. He’s a bit taken aback.

I can’t say that I had all of my scholarly faculties with me at this time, for various reasons, but I was committed to taking as many notes as possible. What follows is the raw, unedited extent of what I was able to record. My field notes, if you will:

Most of these notes are in response to his musings about field work in Kazakhstan he does during the summer, with some personal anecdotes and quips that he was adding in to make things…I guess more relatable to us?

He described his love of horse meat during his travels, as well as getting drunk in the field with his colleagues, which is a favorite pastime of his. 

I write down his description of the pastoral nomads: “Wayward young men going around and spreading that Y chromosome”

I interject at this point with a comment of my own.

“Wow, they were really horny and mobile, huh?”

He responds: “yeah and they’re not the only ones.”

The crowd erupts with an “oh brother” type of noise at this feeble attempt to make things sexual. It’s clear that he’s trying to salvage any remaining hope that this is actually just some elaborate kink of ours that will somehow lead to a crazy orgy. Mathilde has a pocket knife tucked in her boot. 

At this point we switch our discussion to our other favorite anthropological subject, which is asking about his experiences on The App. 

He says that he was put on by his best friend in the PhD program, who is an avid user. He goes on for quite a bit about his bestie’s sexual prowess and it gets to a point where we’re both annoyed and completely fascinated by his escapades. We gently redirect the conversation back to the man we’ve invited into our home. 

Originally, he says that he was a Tinder user, occasionally meeting someone and “doing a little something something,” but found that Tinder had its limitations in terms of further exploring aspects of the kink community that he’d been interested in. 

He tells us that his ex-girlfriend (who he met in undergrad) was a sheEO. As in CEO, but she. I jot this term down furiously and plan to use it in everyday conversation. 

When asked why he moved from Tinder to the other app, he explained that it’s a common move for people like him, either due to being banned on other dating apps or just not finding the right matches. He calls these “refugees from other dating apps.” 

We all pause at this comment and disregard the implications here…there’s an unspoken feeling that we’ll discuss this later so, again, I jot down this phrase for future reference.

After an extensive interview, there’s a lull, and he switches some of our questions back on us. He asks us about our experiences on the app, which at this point we’re pretty limited, so we just spoke in terms of what we were looking to get out of it. 

We end up talking about college for a while, and he inquires about our studies. Each of us goes on a little soliloquy about our intellectual pursuits, which range from urban planning to erotic experimental cinema. He’s silent for most of this, and then he says:

“You know…I was expecting you guys to be kind of scary and freaky but it turns out you’re, like, really nerdy.”

So he was terrified he was going to be tied up and tortured and we were kind of scared of the same thing but in the end we just ended up having a strangely pleasant nerd-off in Mathilde’s living room. How refreshing. 

During a silently awkward moment he pulls out his phone…perhaps he’s on Instagram Reels, or perhaps he’s on our favorite app. It’s unclear, but in any case I take a moment to appreciate the image of him doomscrolling in the cuck chair. 

On his way out he gave us a bunch of joints that he had in his pocket. We distributed them amongst ourselves but I don’t think any of us ever ended up smoking them. I know I didn’t. I just keep it in my room as a memento of this wonderful evening of intellectual cucking. 

We came to the conclusion that this so-called intellectual cucking occurs when the male ego is challenged by a woman who can handle herself well in a cerebral sparring match, so well that her ideas can render him totally dominated. I feel like in some ways we accomplished this with him, as by the end of our evening he was entirely perplexed and maybe even turned off by how serious we were about learning the intricacies of post graduate education. 

After he leaves, we check the app again to find that another man has offered to DoorDash us Thai food. Hallelujah. 

By this point it’s approaching 2am, so we type out our order (which totals over $100) and take a nap in Mathilde’s room while we wait for it to arrive. All 4 of us are splayed across the room – me on the floor, one on her couch, and two on the bed. When our alarm goes off about an hour later we are groggy and famished. Our friend stumbles out to retrieve the spoils of war. 

We eat in the living room, sitting across from the now empty cuck chair, which still bears the imprint from the PhD student. I visited Mathilde’s house a few more times over the course of the following weeks. The chair stayed exactly where we put it for an alarming amount of time. 

It has only recently been moved. 

~

Stop by next week to find out...something awesome. Doesn't this make you want to go to grad school?

Yours truly,

Cheyenne