About

Catherine the Great's Furniture refers to a set of erotic furniture that supposedly belonged to Russian empress Catherine the Great, photographs and stories of which appeared in various blogs starting in 2010. Online, reverse-psychology Don't Google memes that bait users into looking up the set have been spread on TikTok and other sites in the 2020s.

Origin

On February 6th, 2011, LiveJournal user gallant-age^[1] made a post about the 18th-century Russian empress Catherine the Great having a secret cabinet with several pieces of erotic furniture commissioned by the empress for one of her lovers. The evidence of the erotic set being real is seen in photographs of it obtained by Belgian documentary director and researcher Peter Woditsch, whose father's friends took pictures of erotic furniture they found in Tsarskoye Selo during World War II. Woditsch later traveled to Russia to discover more, however, the existence of Catherine's erotic cabinet was denied by museum workers.

Additionally, in the 1930s, a collection of erotic art owned by the Romanov dynasty was cataloged. This catalog was allegedly destroyed by Stalinists in the 1950s.

In 2011, French furniture company Henryot & Cie restored^[2] two of the items from the photographs, including a table supported by four phalluses resting on breasts and a chair with several erotic installations. In an exhibition annotation, the items in the photographs are ascribed to Catherine the Great.

Spread

The photographs and the story were widely circulated online in the following years, first among Russian-speaking users on LiveJournal,^[3][4] and later on various blogs. On October 16th, 2023, Sang Bleu^[5] made the earliest English post about the collection. On October 23rd, 2014, Redditor innuendoPL made a post about the furniture set that garnered over 5,600 reposts in the /r/WTF^[6] subreddit prior to removal.

On July 26th, 2017, BuzzFeed^[7] posted a collectible about the furniture set titled "The X-Rated Furniture Of Catherine The Great Is Something You Need To See" (announcement X^[8] post shown below).

On May 4th and 5th, 2022, TikToker^[9][10] ashleywolfchick made two videos about the collection that received over 537,000 and 1.3 million views in two years, respectively (shown below, left and right).

For educational purposes: go on Google and look up "Catherine the Great X-rated furniture". You'll thank me later. I'd show you the images myself but I don't wanna be in TikTok jail again.

In 2023 and 2024, more Don't Google posts about Catherine the Great's furniture appeared on TikTok and other sites. For example, on November 17th, 2023, X^[11] user @ShitpostGate posted a Worst Mistake of My Life meme that garnered over 170 reposts and 6,300 likes in five months (shown below).

Various Examples

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7317752392580074784

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7337120306785471787

Search Interest

External References