No one likes to feel embarrassed for any reason. It’s one of the more unpleasant sensations you can deal with that doesn’t include any physical pain and in the worst instances it can really harm someone emotionally or psychologically.
There are ways to deal with embarrassment to make sure it doesn’t affect you but not everyone is able to cope with it as well as others. Sometimes the reactions are completely unexpected and extreme.
10. KISS Made a Movie No One Was Allowed to Talk About
KISS was hands down one of the biggest rock n’ roll acts of the ’70s and well beyond. Their shows were theatrical in ways few others were and the band members created personas to go along with the makeup they wore for their performances. It’s no wonder that there was some crossover appeal, and the idea arose that maybe the band should be involved in a movie. So along came 1978’s KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.
The movie is a made for TV feature and it was produced by cartoon company Hanna-Barbera which explains the nearly Scooby Doo name for the film and its plot which involves the band using magical powers to protect an amusement park from a sinister inventor who wants to tear it down.
The movie was objectively bad. We know this because even KISS hates it. Paul Stanley says they were sold on the idea of the movie when they were told it was like A Hard Day’s Night meets Star Wars. He also said he and the rest of the band were idiots who didn’t know anything.
Stanley said it’s kitsch these days, but it was never meant to be while also acknowledging that no one in the band read the script. He said he was so embarrassed upon his initial viewing he basically slid down onto the floor.
Stanley said it’s kitsch these days but it was never meant to be while also acknowledging that no one in the band read the script. He said he was so embarrassed upon his initial viewing he basically slid down onto the floor.
Though the band seems to have more or less come to terms with how bad it is, for years no one who worked for them was even allowed to mention it around them.
9. King Francis Found the Erotic Artwork of Pompeii So Embarrassing He Locked It Up
The city of Pompeii was destroyed by the sudden and devastating eruption of Mt. Vesuvius all the way back in the year 79. The remains were only discovered in the year 1748 and the stark contrast between Victorian sensibilities and those of the ancient residents of Pompeii did not go unnoticed.
The people on Pompeii were not ashamed of art that included depictions of sex and nudity. But the Victorians certainly were, at least publicly. The erotic artworks were so shocking that Kin Francis had what he considered the worst of it locked away in a secret room after viewing a display in 1819.
The secret room was not fully secret, of course. It could be accessed by “people of mature age and respected morals” which seemed to mean rich men who could afford to see the King’s historical peep show.
To outsiders it was just an example of the King being embarrassed by what he’d seen since he had gone to the museum exhibit with his wife and daughter for his initial viewing. .
8. A Russian Chess Master Who Lost to Bobby Fischer Was Punished by His Government
The Soviet Union had a chip on its shoulder when it came to international competition. Rocky gave us a nice fictional version of this with Ivan Drago taking on Rocky, but in real life their chess champ Mark Taimanov dealt with a much worse fate when he proved himself unable to show Soviet dominance.
In 1971 Taimanov faced off against US champion Bobby Fischer. Taimanov lost 0-6. This loss wasn’t just the loss of a chess game for the Soviets. Mired in the Cold War as they were, it was symbolic and it was considered a massive embarrassment to lose so badly. So they responded in the worst way possible by punishing Taimanov for his failure.
He was stripped of any titles he had earned and forbidden from traveling. Taimanov had been a pianist aside from being a chess player and the travel restriction meant he had no real way to earn a living anymore, which was intentional. As a Soviet grandmaster, his salary was entirely from the government. They took it from him and left him nothing for two years.
7. The Guillotin Family Changed Their Family Name
The guillotine is one of the more infamous creations of the French Revolution and synonymous with both the end of the aristocracy and, of course, beheadings. It’s named for Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a doctor and the man often listed as the device’s inventor.
Not only did Guillotin not invent the guillotine, he didn’t even like it. He was against the death penalty entirely. However, as a doctor, he wanted to ensure those who were executed were executed as humanely as possible and it was his opinion that the guillotine was the best method France had available when compared to being burned or drawn and quartered. So he reluctantly and unintentionally became the tool’s spokesman in that regard. He convinced the government to use it as the only method of execution.
His family hated that the machine was named after him and even tried to get the government to change the name. They refused. As a last resort, out of sheer embarrassment, they changed their own name to avoid any association.
6. Stethoscopes Were Invented by a Doctor Too Embarrassed to Listen to the Chest of a Female Patient
A stethoscope is a pretty ubiquitous tool in the world of doctors today but it wasn’t always so. The device only exists because one doctor in the 1860s was too embarrassed to do his job properly.
The stethoscope is used to listen to a heartbeat. Most doctors did this by just putting their ear to a patient’s chest. But French doctor Rene Laennec felt too uncomfortable doing this to female patients. And, in fairness, female patients of male doctors are probably happy to have less direct contact.
In order to get past the discomfort of actually touching his patient, Laennec rolled a tube of paper and used that. He was surprised to notice it worked better than his ear alone. He went on to refine the design by using a wooden tube and they evolved from there.
5. Edward De Vere Farted in Front of the Queen and Exiled Himself for 7 Years
Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford was born in 1550 and had an experience no one ever wants. When in the presence of the Queen. His claim to fame comes from a book called Brief Lives by John Aubrey. In it, Aubrey describes the incident in which the Earl met the Queen and let loose a fart in her presence.
So embarrassed was De Vere that he immediately left court and stayed out of England for 7 years in an effort to try to live it down. When he finally returned the Queen was more than welcoming and remarked “My lord, I had forgot the fart.”
4. George Levick Observed Embarrassing Sexuality in Penguins So he Wrote About Them in Greek To Hide the Truth
There’s a reason that we use words like “animalistic,” “savage,” and “bestial” to describe when people are acting a certain way. We describe extreme behaviors in terms we’d use to describe the behavior of animals because they lack the reason and intelligence we expect from human behavior. Usually these words describe violence but they can also describe something remarkably stupid, clumsy or, in some cases, sexual. And that’s where the embarrassment comes in.
If you’re describing animal behavior, you shouldn’t expect it to have any of the same decorum or morality of human behavior, but explorer Dr. George Levick was not prepared for that when he made it to Antarctica in 1910. When confronted by penguins for the first time, birds he would go on to describe as “hooligans” but not in a way that was meant to be funny, he was shocked.
The sexual activities he observed among penguins included necrophilia and other unpalatable behaviors. So, despite writing about them, he was too embarrassed to actually share any of his observations. The pamphlet he wrote, “Sexual Habits of Adélie Penguins,” was written entirely in Greek so few if any people back home in England would understand it. Only the “educated” would be able to understand and deal with the shocking truth of penguins.
3. Orson Welles was Embarrassed By His Own Nose
To this day, Orson Welles is regarded as one of the best filmmakers of all time. His masterpiece Citizen Kane is considered one of, if not the single greatest film of all time by many critics while some consider Touch of Evil to be even better.
He was a writer, a director and an actor of great acclaim so it’s kind of curious to note that he suffered a remarkable insecurity in his work life. Welles was terribly embarrassed by his own nose.
If you watch enough of his films, you’ll notice something unusual about his face. His nose changes from role to role and it almost never looks the same twice. That’s because he was wearing a fake nose in every film he made. He was constantly wearing prosthetics so no one could see his real nose.
Welles felt his real nose was too small and lacked character. This became such a problem that, on one film, they had to wait two days to film anything because Welles’ nose was lost in transit.
2. Hail to the Chief Was Used to Prevent James Polk From being Embarrassed That No One Noticed Him
If you’re an American or even just someone who’s seen a movie featuring an American President entering a room, you’ve probably heard the song Hail to the Chief. It’s the standard music to introduce the President to a crowd and signal that they have arrived.
The history of the song dates back to a poem well before it was set to music. It was used to honor George Washington once sometime after his death but the first use of the song for a living President was in 1828 when it was performed for John Quincy Adams.
Julia Tyler, wife of John Tyler, was the first to ask that it be used to announce her husband’s arrival. But we can thank Sarah Polk, wife of James Polk, who decided it should be standard routine for the song to be played every time the President arrived somewhere.
The reason for Polk was that her husband was not a man with a commanding presence and it seemed like no one noticed when he arrived most times so, to avoid the embarrassment of no one realizing he was there, the song would make sure everyone knew.
1. Japan Has Many Sound-Masking Toilet Technologies
There aren’t a lot of things that are so embarrassing on a cultural level that whole industries spring up to profit off of it but there is at least one such case in Japan.
The cultural taboo around the sounds made in the bathroom has become so prominent that numerous products have been developed to help mask, subdue, overwhelm and disguise those noises so everyone can pretend they don’t exist.
The Sound Princess or Otohime is one such device. It creates the sound of running water to mask the sound of urination. For a time, the embarrassment over having to hear their own urination had led some women to just constantly flush the toilet again and again to mask it. The Sound Princess was a much simpler and more ecologically friendly way to accomplish the same goal.
Japan has dozens of high-tech toilet designs these days, all of which seem to include some kind of sound masking technology to assist those who want to mask their own noises. This actually dates back to at least the Edo period in Japan in the 1600s. Bamboo taps would allow water to flow to disguise the sounds of anyone using the facilities.