Child Custody Myths: How Common is Cuckoldry?

“Cuck” is one of the new insults-of-the-moment, being somewhere behind “Snowflake” but above “Cupcake” on the list of insults-of-the-moment, and it’s a fascinating one insofar as it is built on a myth…but it’s a myth that nearly everyone buys into with gusto. A cuck is someone who is soft, pansy, effeminate, and weak. The interesting part, though, is that it’s derived from ‘cuckold,’ meaning ‘a man who is unwittingly raising another man’s child.’

The idea that you have to be soft or weak to be tricked into raising another man’s child is, of course, silly. All you have to be is human. There’s absolutely nothing about being a tough, canny, salt-of-the-earth S.O.B. that somehow keeps you from being fooled into raising a kid that isn’t yours. You don’t even have to be fooled — it’s not like a woman who has multiple sexual partners necessarily knows which one of them is the father of her child. But just how many real cuckolds are there in the US?

The Myth
Ask around — or Google a little — and you’ll find some stunning numbers on cuckoldry. The lower estimates sit around 10%; the more aggressive ones claim that as many as 30% of men are cucks. (Math tells us that, if 30% of men are cuckolded, it means that less than 50% of paternal grandfathers are actually the paternal grandfathers of their grandchildren. That’s a little hinkey!)

If these numbers are anything close to real, the number of men being cuckolded is a legitimate social emergency. And amazingly, the numbers put out by paternity-testing facilities match these estimates!

The Reality
Of course, those numbers are flawed. That’s because they are what’s called self-selecting: they only study children whose parent(s) already know they want a paternity test. Of course, if they already know they want a paternity test, they usually have a good reason to believe that they need one. It’s not all that surprising that even among parents who have reason to seek a paternity test, the rate of actual non-paternity is 29.8%.

When studies specifically select for men who are particularly secure in their fatherhood, of course, the number is much lower. But how much lower? Try 1.7%. Which is to say that if you don’t have any reason to think that your child is not your own, you’re 98.3% likely to be correct.

But it turns out that there are only about 300,000 paternity tests performed in the US each year, out of about 4 million births. That’s about 9% of all births that qualify for that high rate of non-paternity, which if you average it all out comes to just over 4% of all men that are raising the wrong child.

All things considered, knowing that 1 in 25 men are being cuckolded — deliberately or otherwise — might still sound like quite a lot. But it’s certainly a huge sight fewer than the 3-in-10 number being floated by the people who like to call men “cucks,” and that’s really the important part.