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Did Catherine Really Have Sex With a Horse?
Power, Pleasure, and the Art of Destroying Queens
For 200 years, we believed that one of history’s greatest empresses died trying to fuck a horse. The legend is so ridiculous it shouldn’t even need debunking, but here we are.
Eighteenth-century men really wanted us to believe that Catherine the Great had a complex system of pulleys and harnesses built to suspend a stallion in the air so she could position herself strategically underneath it. And not satisfied with that part of the story, they went on to claim that the system failed and she died crushed by the animal.
Really?
The patriarchy has a sick obsession with turning powerful women into sexual monsters.
If a queen or empress dares to show that she has desires like any human being, she immediately becomes an uncontrolled nymphomaniac. Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn — they all went through this. But with Catherine, they went further.
It wasn’t enough to say she had lovers or was insatiable.
No, they had to invent a story involving bestiality and a spectacularly pornographic death.
The most pathetic thing about this whole story is that while they were spreading these absurd lies, Catherine was busy…
