Tinder Would Probably Ban These Famous Historic Figures

Degenerate Imperial Siblings

Prince Tuan’s brother, Prince Chu, was worse. Chu once had one of his concubines whipped, then personally chopped off her head. He had another concubine tortured with red hot irons. Chu’s wife accused one of his concubines of infidelity. So the prince had the accused whipped, then gathered the rest of his harem and made them burn her with hot needles. Princes Tuan and Chu had nothing though on their brother, Prince Chien. Prince Chien was an out and out sadistic monster. Unlike his brother Tuan, who did not like the ladies and felt sick looking at them, Chien liked the ladies – in a variety of sick ways, to their detriment and misfortune. Chien carried on incestuous relationships with his own sisters, and forced himself on some of them when they did not willingly submit to his advances. Not a good Tinder match.

As to the concubines and wives in his harem, Chien liked to torment them. Some of the harem women who displeased him – and who knew what might displease the psycho prince from one day to the next – he forced to sit naked in trees for days on end. Others, he forced keep time to a drum all day long. Others, he simply starved to death. He also liked to drown young boys and girls in a palace lake, as their desperate thrashings amused and aroused him. Princes Tuan and Chien were not the only degenerates in that family, and ancient Chinese sources hold that quite a few of Emperor Jing’s other relatives were also sick sadists. Per contemporary sources, male members of the imperial family routinely engaged in incest with their sisters and other female relatives, and were not above assaulting any married woman that caught their eye.

Charlemagne Might Not Have Been a Good Fit for Tinder

Charlemagne (742 – 814) was one of medieval Europe’s greatest figures. A Frankish king, he led a series of campaigns that unified much of western and central Europe. In 800, he was crowned by Pope Leo III as “Emperor of the Romans” – the first in a line of Holy Roman Emperors that lasted until Napoleon abolished the position in 1806. While inarguably a great man, Charlemagne was also a weirdo, who was into incest and necrophilia. Charlemagne had a thing for his sister, Gillen, and had an incestuous relationship with her. Medieval accounts report that he became consumed with guilt over his conduct, and visited the tomb of Saint-Gilles, near Nimes, where he prayed for forgiveness. An angel then showed up and placed a parchment on the altar. It declared that the saint’s intercession worked, and that God forgave Charlemagne so long as he did not repeat the sin.

While the part about the angel is a myth, many modern scholars give credence to the reports of incest. Charlemagne probably did sleep with Gillen, and he fathered upon her a son/ nephew, named Roland. Incest with his sister was not the worst of Charlemagne’s deviant practices that might’ve gotten him kicked off dating apps like Tinder: he reportedly had a thing for sleeping with corpses. A variety of texts from the ninth century refer to Charlemagne repeated engagement in, but refusal for a long time to confess to, some “unspeakable sin”. He eventually gets it off his chest and seeks absolution for what some scholars think was a predilection for necrophilia. The necrophilia reports eventually gave rise to legends in which Charlemagne’s partiality to corpses extended from satisfying his lusts with random corpses, to sleeping with his wife’s corpse after she died.

A Pope Too Scandalous for Tinder

John XII, history’s youngest pope, ascended to the Holy See at the age of eighteen in 955. It marked the beginning of a scandalous and tumultuous papacy. Born Octavianus, he was the product of an incestuous union between Rome’s influential figure, Alberic II, Duke of Spoleto, and his stepsister. Elevated to the papacy through a pre-death oath by his father, John XII showed little interest in spiritual duties. He descended into a life of depravity and pleasure. Selling church offices, ordaining a ten-year-old as a bishop, and engaging in violent acts, he transformed the Lateran Palace into a notorious den of drunken parties and illicit activities.

John XII’s reign, marked by a lack of respect for church offices, violent tendencies, and licentious behavior, reached its climax after nine tumultuous years on the papal throne. His death is shrouded in two conflicting accounts, one depicting a massive stroke during a rather “intimate” and exposed encounter and another suggesting his demise at the hands of a cuckolded husband who interrupted an adulterous liaison. The scandalous and chaotic life of Pope John XII remains a dark chapter in papal history, reflecting the consequences of unchecked power and unbridled hedonism.

A Fiendish Prince

In the 18th century, King Yeongjo of Korea grappled with the pressing need for a male heir, and his eventual successor, Crown Prince Sado, born in 1735, initially brought great joy to the royal household. However, the king’s hands-off approach to Sado’s upbringing proved consequential, creating an environment where the young prince was surrounded by indulgence and lacked the guidance he desperately needed. Despite attempts to please his father during rare encounters, Sado grew up unloved and harboring deep resentment. As Sado matured, he exhibited troubling signs of mental instability, marked by sudden and violent mood swings that left scholars speculating about a potential diagnosis of schizophrenia.

His descent into alcoholism, even within the forbidden confines of the royal court, further fueled a dark transformation. Sado’s reign of terror unfolded. He engaged in depraved acts of violence, including the murder of servants, harassment of court ladies, and even the murder of his own concubine. His notoriety spread across Korea, with Sado becoming infamous as a serial rapist, serial killer, and an all-around psychopath. Obvious grounds for banning from Tinder and any other socials. Faced with the horrifying reality of his son’s actions, King Yeongjo, on July 4th, 1762, decided to depose Crown Prince Sado. However, cultural taboos prevented the direct execution of the prince. Instead, a chilling fate awaited Sado. He was sealed inside a sizable wooden grain storage container, left to perish from starvation.

Nero Would Have to Add “Murdered My Own Mom” To His Tinder Bio

The Roman Emperor Nero (37 – 68 AD) was one of history’s oddest rulers. He became emperor as a teenager in 54 AD, and was dominated by his mother, who reportedly controlled him with incest. As contemporaries described it: “whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by stains in his clothing“. That sheds light on how Nero ended up so depraved. When he tried to assert his independence as he grew older, Nero’s mother refused to give up her power, and continued to meddle in government. So he decided to murder her, and resorted to elaborate means to make it look accidental.

Nero’s mom survived each attempted “accidental death”. Exasperated, he finally gave up on subtlety and simply had his henchmen club her to death. With his mother out of the way, Nero finally started to live life his way. He fancied himself an avant garde artiste, and liked to shock public sensibilities. Public displays of deviant intimate practices were the easiest way to do that. So Nero reportedly “defiled every single part of his body“, and when he tired of run of the mill perversions, “he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched by his freedman Doryphorus.”

You Would Not Want To Be Nero’s Mother Or Lover

At some point, Nero fell in love with a youth name Sporus, and married him in a public ceremony intended to shock: “He castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife.” Nero put a lot of thought into his perversions, and liked to organize and preplan them. So much that he set up conjugal rest stops in advance of his vacation routes. As described by contemporaries: “Whenever he drifted down the Tiber to Ostia, or sailed about the Gulf of Baiae, booths were set up at intervals along the banks and shores, fitted out for debauchery, while bartering matrons played the part of inn-keepers and from every hand solicited him to come ashore“.

Nero dedicated himself to pleasure, and spent lavishly to gratify his desires. In the meantime, he neglected the Roman Empire and entrusted its governance to corrupt subordinates, who wrecked it. Finally, in 68 AD, various generals and provincial governors rebelled, the Senate declared Nero a public enemy, and his Praetorian Guard abandoned him. Nero contemplated throwing himself upon the public’s mercy and begging forgiveness. He changed his mind when informed that he would probably be torn apart by the first mob that came across him. So he had had a freedman stab him to death, and cried out with his last breath: “Oh, what an artist dies in me!”

What This Geisha Did Would Get Her Banned from Tinder

Marriage, a union that can end in turmoil, also unfolded in calamity for Kichizo Ishida (1894 – 1936), a womanizing Japanese businessman and restaurateur. The owner of a thriving Tokyo restaurant, Kichizo entrusted his business to his wife while immersing himself in a series of romantic escapades. In 1936, his life took a dark turn as he engaged in an affair with Sada Abe (1905 – 1971). She was a recently-hired former Geisha and prostitute. Their passion escalated into marathon carnal sessions at hotels. Apparently they were indifferent even to the presence of maids cleaning the rooms. As Kichizo casually mentioned the possibility of leaving his wife, Sada, fueled by jealousy, contemplated drastic measures to keep him.

The macabre tale took a shocking turn when Sada attempted to murder Kichizo during an intimate encounter. However, his arousal at the violent act derailed her plans. Undeterred, she later succeeded in strangling him to death with a Geisha belt. Grounds for immediate expulsion from any dating app. Sada’s post-mortem actions were horrific. This included castrating Kichizo, carving her name on his arms, and using his blood to leave chilling messages. The ensuing “Sada Abe Panic” among Japanese men led to her eventual arrest. In a bizarre twist, police found Kichizo’s genitals in Sada’s purse, with her unsettling explanation revealing a disturbing motive. Despite her conviction and five-year prison sentence, Sada Abe lived on, authoring an autobiography until her death in 1971.

The King Who Ordered the Massacre of the Innocents

Herod the Great (74 BC – circa 1 AD) was a Roman client king of Judea whose massive building projects include the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the fortress of Masada. He is best known from the Christian Gospels as the king who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents when Jesus was born. That, however, is probably not what would’ve gotten him banned from Tinder. Less known is that Herod was also a pervert of the grossest kind. He married into the royal Jewish Hasmonean Dynasty, and tied the knot with Princess Mariamne, one of the last Hasmonean heirs. Herod then killed her relatives to remove contenders for the throne, and got the Romans to make him king of the Jews. Mariamne was stunningly beautiful, and Herod was crazy about her – but not in a good way. He was passionately in love with her, and was also crazy jealous.

While Herod loved Mariamne, she did not feel the same. It was understandable: Herod had killed her brother and uncle, and Herod’s father had killed Mariamne’s father. Nonetheless, Herod had five children with her. Like Shakespeare’s Othello, the tensions got too much, and Herod destroyed the object of his affections and obsessions. Mariamne hated Herod, and raised the kids to hate him as well. So Herod eventually had Mariamne executed, as well as his two older sons with her. Even though he ordered her death, was unable to let her go. That is, he was literally unable to let her go. He engaged in egregious acts of necrophilia with his poor late wife’s body.

A Deeply Insane Ottoman That Wouldn’t Be Allowed On Tinder

Ibrahim I (1615 – 1648), or Ibrahim the Mad, reigned as sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1640 to 1648, and his upbringing seemingly predestined him end to become a weirdo. When Ibrahim was eight, his older brother became sultan Murad IV. One of the new sultan’s first edicts was to confine Ibrahim to the Kafes, or “Cage” – a secluded part of the royal Harem, where possible successors to the throne were kept. Ibrahim stayed in the Cage, quaking in fear, until Murad died in 1640 without issue. When taken out of the Cage and informed that he had inherited the throne as the last male Ottoman, Ibrahim declined. More accurately, he fled back to the Cage in terror, and barricaded himself inside.

An early worrying sign was that the new sultan fed fish in the palace pool with coins, instead of food. When it became clear that Ibrahim was unhinged, his mother acted as regent and ruled in his name. To keep Ibrahim busy, she encouraged him to spend as much time as possible in the Harem with his roughly 280 concubines. Ibrahim wasn’t just the fun and games type of crazy: Ibrahim also engaged in the dangerous kind of crazy that gets people banned from Tinder. One day, out of the blue, the Mad Sultan woke up and ordered his entire Harem of 280 women tied in weighted sacks, and drowned in the sea.

The Rake and the Rich Widow (Part 1)

Andrew Robinson Stoney (1747 – 1810) was an Anglo-Irish rake and adventurer. A conman, he infamously tricked a noblewoman into a horrific marriage. It was to ancestress of King Charles III, Mary Bowes, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne (1749 – 1800). She became known as “The Unhappy Countess”, and what Stoney did to her scandalized England and led to a juicy divorce case. Mary was born in London to a wealthy coal baron who died when she was eleven, and left her a fortune of about one million pounds – Paris Hilton type money back then. It made Mary Europe’s wealthiest heiress, and one of Britain’s most desirable women. Aristocrats wooed her, and she enjoyed and encouraged the attentions, before finally marrying the Earl of Strathmore and Kingmore on her eighteenth birthday.

The couple had five children, but when the earl caught tuberculosis, Mary grew frustrated with his debility and lack of libido. She cheated on her husband with a series of lovers, and earned a reputation for licentiousness. When the earl finally succumbed in 1776, the widowed Mary resumed control of her fortune, and took up with a lover, George Gray. He got her pregnant four times within a year, and Mary aborted each one. She finally resigned herself to marry Gray after the fourth pregnancy. Before tying the knot, however, she met and was seduced by Andrew Robinson Stoney, a British Army lieutenant who styled himself a “Captain”. In 1777, Stoney wrote anonymous scurrilous articles about Mary, and had them published in a newspaper. He then feigned outrage over the insult to Mary’s honor, and challenged the newspaper’s editor, who was in on the scam, to a duel.

The Rake and the Rich Widow (Part 2)

In a fake fight, Stoney pretended to have been “mortally injured”. Appealing to Mary’s romantic side, he begged her to grant him his dying wish: her hand in marriage. Moved, and figuring that the marriage would only last a few hours, Mary agreed to wed Captain Stoney, who was carried down the aisle on a stretcher. Soon after the vows were exchanged and the ceremony concluded, Stoney made a miraculous recovery. In those days, husbands had the right to control their wives’ finances, but Stoney discovered that a prenuptial agreement stood in the way. Undaunted, he forced Mary to revoke the prenuptial and hand control of her fortune over to him. Stoney then imprisoned Mary in their home, and began to squander her wealth like a drunken sailor on shore. Over the next eight years, he made his captive wife’s life a living hell. Not the best Tinder material.

Stoney abused Mary physically and emotionally, and assaulted and impregnated her maids. He brought prostitutes home, carried on numerous affairs, and fathered many illegitimate children. Mary finally escaped in 1785 and filed for divorce. Stoney was loathe to give up on his meal ticket. So he tracked Mary down and kidnapped her. He took her to northern England, where he tortured and threatened to kill her. He also forced her to ride around the countryside on horseback during an extremely cold winter, in the hope that she would sicken and die. She was eventually rescued when a hue and cry was raised. Afterwards, Stoney was tracked down and arrested. The divorce case resumed, and along with criminal charges against Stoney, captivated Britain for years. Stoney and his accomplices were convicted of abduction and sentenced to three years imprisonment, and Mary finally got her divorce in 1789.

Tiberius Was Even More Degenerate than Nero (And Should Have Been Arrested)

Notoriously debauched Roman emperors such as Caligula, Nero, and Heliogabalus, are infamous for their public displays of deviancy. Emperor Tiberius (42 BC – 37 AD, reigned 14 – 37 AD), while not as out of control insane as the aforementioned trio, exceeded them in perversion. He just preferred to be a pervert in relative privacy and seclusion, rather than put it all out on public display. Rome’s other notoriously degenerate rulers, Caligula, Nero, and Heliogabalus, ascended the throne as teenagers or immature young men, and went crazy with the sudden power. By contrast, Tiberius came to the throne as a mature middle aged man – he was in his mid-fifties when he succeeded Augustus as emperor in 14 AD.

Given his age when he became emperor, Tiberius was not driven by youthful passions and the need to engage in ostentatious displays to shock and attract attention. Such behavior would have run against his personality, anyhow, since even as a young man, Tiberius was taciturn, withdrawn, and introverted. Instead, the new emperor built himself a vast pleasure palace compound, secluded in the island of Capri. There, he wallowed in all kinds of perversions of the kind that would have gotten him kicked off apps like Tinder. Most notably, Tiberius engaged in pedophilia. Among other things, he had toddlers trained to dive under water while he was in a pool to “nibble” at him as he swam. He called them his “minnows”.

Tiberius’s Perversion Palace Would Have Gotten Him Kicked Off Tinder (And Hopefully Arrested)

Tiberius also had pleasure gardens stocked with teenaged boys and girls. Sometimes younger. They were dressed in outfits from Greco-Roman myths and legends. Oftentimes, they were forced to run around in various states of undress. As he grew older, Tiberius grew increasingly impotent, and was often just a spectator in the perversions acted out for his pleasure. Inside his palaces and villas, he had walls covered with explicit paintings and murals of all kinds of carnal acts. From the routine to the shockingly depraved. The artwork served as a menu. When Tiberius wanted to cut to the chase, all he had to do was point at a particular painting to communicate what he wanted done. There are even rumors of younger victims that he subjected to his sick perversions.

Examining historical figures like Tiberius and others reveals a troubling pattern. Indecency, perversion, and a lack of compassion marred their reigns. Such traits, rendering individuals profoundly unfit for leadership, cast shadows on their ability to govern effectively. A ruler’s duty extends beyond wielding power; it involves governing with integrity, empathy, and a genuine concern for the well-being of the governed. Leaders marked by moral turpitude and a disregard for basic human decency not only corrode the fabric of their societies but also contribute to a legacy of dysfunction, cruelty, and suffering.

The Ugly Duckling’s Author Was an Ugly Duckling

Hans Christian Andersen (1805 – 1875), the celebrated Danish author known for his literary fairy tales like The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling, faced a childhood marred by poverty and relentless teasing due to his homeliness. Born to impoverished parents, he was sent to work in a local mill at a young age, grappling with dire want from the outset. The Ugly Duckling, one of his iconic tales, found its roots in Andersen’s own miserable childhood, marked by bullying and mockery from his peers. Despite these hardships, Andersen’s literary legacy became a cornerstone of childhoods worldwide.

However, beyond his literary achievements, Andersen’s personal life took peculiar turns. Overcoming his troubled past, he channeled his experiences into impactful stories. Yet, beneath the surface, Andersen harbored compulsive habits, including excessive self-pleasuring. His diary meticulously chronicled these sessions, adorned with double plus signs (++). His penchant for engaging with prostitutes, coupled with his clinginess, would likely lead to his expulsion from Tinder. Andersen’s maudlin and needy tendencies extended to his romantic pursuits. He frequently fell for individuals who didn’t reciprocate. He would write impassioned love letters and relishing rejection, all while accumulating more ++ entries for his diary.

The Perverted Donatien Alphonse Francois

Donatien Alphonse Francois, Comte de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814), was a French aristocrat who became notorious for deviant practices, perversions, and erotic writings. Stuff that gets people kicked off Tinder. He so combined pornography with philosophy and violent pleasure fantasies, that his name gave rise to the terms sadist and sadism. Unlike most other figures on this list, who had significant life accomplishments in fields outside the bedroom that sufficed to earn them a place in history, de Sade was a pervert who is known to history only for being a pervert. He did write about politics and philosophy. However, were it not for the perverse things that he did, and the perverse things that he wrote about wanting to do, little would be known today about history’s most famous marquis.

De Sade advocated radically unrestrained freedom, and his fantasies emphasized violence, criminality, and blasphemy – a shoo-in for a Tinder ban. His real life engagement in criminally violent perversions kept him behind bars in prisons and insane asylums for most of his adult life. On and off, he spent 32 years behind bars, including 10 years in the Bastille. Most of his writings were penned while incarcerated. He was addicted to prostitutes from early on, and even more addicted to their mistreatment. In the early 1760s, he first appeared in the record after numerous Paris prostitutes complained of his mistreatment. That led to several short jail stints, before he was exiled from Paris to his countryside residence. The details of the abuse are murky, but the fact that a French aristocrat ended up behind bars in Ancien Regime days, based on his treatment of prostitutes, indicates seriousness.

A Sadistic Marquis Who Would Not Have Fared Well on Tinder

De Sade’s first big scandal occurred in 1768, when he lured a street beggar to his home with an offer of a housekeeping job. He tore off her clothes, tied her to a sofa, then flogged and poured hot wax on her. That’s not the kind of person apps like Tinder want on their platform. His victim finally escaped out a second floor window. De Sade’s family made the investigation that resulted in a royal decree that removed the case from the jurisdiction of the courts. Another scandal followed in 1772. De Sade and his body servant sodomized prostitutes in Marseilles after they incapacitated them with doses of Spanish fly.

They skipped the trial, fled to Italy, and were sentenced to death in absentia. The duo were caught and imprisoned in Savoy, but escaped after a few months and hid in de Sade’s rural castle in southeast France. There, the marquis had a high turnover of employees. He repeatedly hired youngsters as domestics, only for them to quit within a short time, complaining of predation and mistreatment. When the parents of local boys and girls complained to the authorities, de Sade was forced to flee to Italy once more, until things quieted down.

The Marquis De Sade Would Have Been a Shoo In for a Tinder Ban And Jail Time

De Sade returned to France in 1776 and resumed the kinds of perversions that get people kicked off Tinder. They steadily intensified, and one scandal followed another in quick succession. Finally, the authorities tricked him in 1777 to go to Paris to visit his supposedly sick mother. Unbeknownst to him, she had actually died. When he reached Paris, de Sade was arrested and locked up in the dungeon of a royal fortress. He was kept there, in harsh conditions, until 1784, when he was transferred to the Bastille. He remained there until transferred to a mental asylum two days before the Bastille was stormed in 1789.

De Sade was released in 1790 amidst France’s revolutionary turmoil. He took to the new order, and took to calling himself “Citizen Sade”. Within months, he got himself elected to the National Convention as a representative of the far left. He barely survived the Reign of Terror, during which he was imprisoned for a year. He emerged from jail in 1794, utterly destitute. In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered de Sade arrested and imprisoned without trial for pornographic novels he had written years earlier. In 1803, de Sade’s family had him declared insane and transferred from prison to a mental asylum. There, he continued to write, and staged plays with inmates as actors. His writing career ended in 1809, when de Sade was transfered to solitary confinement, and deprived of pen and paper.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Aggrawal, Anil – Necrophilia: Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects (2010)

All That is Interesting – Andrew Robinson Stoney May Have Been England’s Worst Husband, Ever

AV Club – The Young Pope John XII Died as He Lived: Fornicating

Balfour, Patrick, Lord Kinross – Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (1977)

BBC History – Charlemagne

Catholic Answers – It Is Better to Be Herod’s Pig Than Son

Cracked – 5 Historic Figures Who Would Definitely be Banned From Tinder

CVLT Nation – Japan’s Most Infamous Killer Geisha

Daily Sabbah, August 7^th, 2015 – The History of Fratricide in the Ottoman Empire

Encyclopedia Britannica – Mariamne, Wife of Herod

Encyclopedia Britannica – Marquis de Sade

Gulik, Robert Hans Van – Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese S*x and Society From ca. 1500 BC Till 1644 AD (2003)

History Collection – Stunning Images Captured of the Most Attractive People in History

Independent, The, March 27^th, 2005 – His Dark Materials

Jewish Encyclopedia – Mariamne

Lely, Gilbert – The Marquis de Sade, a Biography (1961)

Mad Monarchs – Sado of Korea

Moore, Wendy – Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match (2009)

Murderpedia – Sada Abe

New Advent – Pope John XII

PBS – Tiberius

Perowne, Stewart – The Life and Times of Herod the Great (1959)

Ranker – Facts About Ibrahim I, the Man Who Lived in a Cage

Schaeffer, Neil – The Marquis de Sade: A Life (2000)

Sima Qian – Records of the Grand Historian

Suetonius – The Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Tacitus – The Annals