Vixen

What is a vixen?

A vixen is the woman who, with her partner’s consent, has sex with other men, in an arrangement with no humiliation in it. The dictionary describes her as a wife who goes to bed with others with her husband’s consent. Her partner is called a stag.

Where the word vixen comes from

From the fox, and by way of an insult. Etymonline traces it to the Old English fyxen, the feminine form of fox, and calls it the only English survivor of the Germanic feminine suffix -en. From the 1570s it stood for a malicious or quarrelsome woman, and only much later, with foxy from 1895 and fox from the 1940s, did the fox tip over into attractive.

That’s exactly the turn this role name leans on. A word that served four hundred years as an insult is here chosen by the woman herself. And it’s the only role name in this corner that says nothing about her marital status: hotwife and cuckoldress both carry a husband inside them, vixen doesn’t.

In Dutch the word doesn’t exist. The newspaper archive of the Royal Library returns 2,395 hits, but those are ships named Vixen in the shipping news of the nineteenth century, and between 1974 and 1976 the cinema ads for Russ Meyer’s film Vixen!.

Why women prefer to say vixen

Because the name is about her and not about a marriage. Someone who reads hotwife reads a woman who belongs to someone and does something on the side. Someone who reads vixen reads an animal that goes out on its own. For some of the women who make this arrangement, that difference is the reason to use the one name and not the other.

• For the vixen herself the name takes the emphasis off whose wife she is and puts it on what she does.
• For her partner something changes in the tone: with stag and vixen two animals stand side by side instead of a wife and an onlooker.

A different word on its own doesn’t change the arrangement, though. Whether this turns out well depends on who chose, not on what the role is called, and what’s known about that is at hotwife and hotwifing.

Where this fits on this site

The question that weighs heaviest here is whether you want this yourself, and that one disappears easily under the planning. If you want to know what that first conversation looks like when the third person is a professional, that’s at cuckolding with a professional bull. The word cuckold doesn’t have to fall from anyone there.

Sources

• vixen. English-language Wiktionary. Gives “a wife who has sex with other men with her husband’s consent” as a separate, colloquially marked meaning, alongside the word’s three other meanings: the female fox, the malicious or quarrelsome woman since late sixteenth-century English, and the sexually attractive woman. Under this last meaning, stag is listed as a related term.
• Vixen. Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, consulted 10 August 2026. Supplies the derivation from the Old English fyxen as the feminine form of fox, the finding that this is the only English word in which the Germanic feminine suffix -en survived, the figurative meaning “ill-tempered woman” from the 1570s, and under the entry fox the meaning “sexually attractive woman” from the 1940s with foxy already from 1895.
• Newspaper archive of the Royal Library (Delpher). Queried via the SRU service on the newspaper-articles collection, 10 August 2026. Supplies that vixen returns 2,395 articles and that two samples from them give no hit at all in this meaning: from before 1946 there are 1,681, and the six records read from those are about ships of that name, such as the Rotterdamsch nieuwsblad of 16 July 1896 about “het schip Vixen, kapt. Prettyman, met phosphaat van Antwerpen naar Garston bestemd” (the ship Vixen, captain Prettyman, carrying phosphate from Antwerp to Garston). Between 1974 and 1976 there are 234, and those are about the cinema screenings of the film Vixen!.

Related terms

A vixen is the same woman as the hotwife; that page has what the role asks of her and what the research says about it.

• Stag. Her partner, and the deer the cuckold’s horns come from.
• Hotwife. Exactly the same woman, with the figures, the pitfalls and the question of what the role asks of her.
• Cuckoldress. Her counterpart in the setup where making small is the whole point.
• Hotwifing. The arrangement around it, in five steps and with the research on jealousy.
• Bull. The man she arranges to meet, and why she’s best off choosing him herself.
• Compersion. The feeling that’s meant to arise on the other side of this arrangement.
• Swinging. The form this role is most often confused with, and in which both partners take part.