Earlier this year, I noticed that something strange was happening in my boyfriend’s apartment. In the run-up to the Euro Football Championship, new furnishings and gear kept appearing: A sleek surround-sound system. A garish English flag. A splashy second monitor. A shiny PerfectDraft beer machine. I couldn’t relate to any of it—not the high-tech equipment, not the multiple screens, not the tribalistic obsession with football. Finally, I had to say something—the apartment’s increasingly testosterone-fueled vibes had grown too hilarious to ignore. “It’s looking like a man cave in here,” I said one morning, scrambling around the beer dispenser, searching for the French press. “It’s you who’s gendering objects,” my boyfriend snapped back.
Later, reflecting on his 70-inch flat-screen TV and black leather couch adorned with consoles, I realized that my boyfriend had a point. What was I trying to convey with “testosterone vibes”? How does an appliance or a piece of décor become gendered? What does a “masculine” living space actually mean? I took to the internet to hunt down some answers, and very quickly, I stumbled into the grungy, bro-y confines of r/mancave.
R/mancave is a subreddit with over 80,000 members, dedicated to men wanting to flex their decorating muscles and get feedback on each other’s homes, bedrooms, and caverns. While the “man cave” is by now a familiar pop culture reference, the Redditors offer a precise definition, writing that it is “the last bastion of masculinity;” a corner “specifically reserved” for men, decorated “without interference from any female influence.”
Scrolling through the Reddit thread can feel like eavesdropping on 16-year-olds’ locker-room banter. “Grow a pair,” comments one user; “I feel my testosterone boiling,” says another. Foosball tables make common appearances, as do bongs, leather recliners, video game consoles, framed sports paraphernalia, minibars, and flat-screen TVs.
In the past 50 years, the number of men living alone in the U.S. has increased, rising from about 6 percent in 1970 to around 13 percent in 2022. As male-only homemakers become increasingly common, forums like r/mancave become records of shifting masculinities: repositories of the fears, anxieties, and desires embedded in everyday decisions like interior design. But will male-only tastemaking ever be free from tinges of toxicity? Is there cultural value—even beauty—in hypermasculine style?
The Rise and Fall of the Bachelor Pad
For most of modern history, homemaking has been women’s work. Magazines like Good Housekeeping became staples for women in the early 20th century, while men were generally seen as not having interest in their home decor. When interior design emerged as a formal profession in this period, it was pioneered by women (unlike architecture, which was dominated by men). As writer and historian Joanna Scutts put it in Curbed, “How a building looked and functioned was a man’s business; how it felt was a woman’s.”
But in the 1950s, that began to change. The post-WWII economic boom ushered in a new era of consumerism and consumption. Factories that had been producing wartime products started creating commodities like televisions, electric razors, and luxury cars. Playboy was born in 1953, and was loaded with adverts for expensive gadgets and designer clothes.
Gradually, a new wave of consumerism took shape. Advertising campaigns began emphasizing personal taste and self-expression. The bland business suit was reinvented in a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns. “If American capitalism can be said to have spent the 1950s dealing in conformity and consumer fakery, during the decade that followed, it would offer the public authenticity, individuality, difference, and rebellion,” wrote American historian Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool.
In 1959, the Chicago Tribune first coined the word “bachelor pad,” marking the emergence of a newly modern male homemaker. Where once family heirlooms and mounted animal heads had reigned supreme, a new visual language for masculine status had emerged. The bachelor pad was sophisticated, seductive. It was, in the words of Hugh Hefner, a place for drinking cocktails, “putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
Playboy built on the bachelor pad fantasy throughout the ’60s, publishing photos of minimalistic penthouses, hi-fi stereo systems, glitzy skyline views—road maps for middle-class men wanting to reinvent themselves. But where the bachelor pad defined itself in terms of high-end taste and luxury, today’s man cave—at least as it is presented by r/mancaves—is instead marked by humility, a return to the bread-and-butter hobbies of the everyday American man. One popular man cave, a neon-lit video game dungeon set up in an actual cupboard under the stairs, says it all: A man cave is an amalgamation of the ordinary; the people’s princess of interior design.
Keefer Williams, a 27-year-old artist and musician living in Buffalo, New York, posted a work-in-progress man cave on the thread two months ago—a space he describes as a “gremlin dome” or “rumpus room.” The idea was to create a space where there was no pressure to produce art that was perfect or commercial, filled with psychedelic paintings, band posters, and acoustic guitars. “This is my little space to hang whatever I make, whether it’s shitty or beautiful,” he said over video call.
Something about the man cave reminded me of being 16, when my school friends and I were too young to go to nightclubs, so we’d spend an embarrassing amount of time in my friend’s shed, smoking joints. Everyone was obsessed with hotboxing—getting high in an enclosed room, like a car or a bathroom or a telephone box, to maximize its effect. It wasn’t just smoking weed; it was making weed-smoking the world itself. The man cave has a similar adolescent fervor. It involves taking an activity, like gaming or watching soccer or making music, and pushing it to the extreme—multiplying it by itself.
Unlike the designer furniture and minimalist design of bachelor pads, man caves are chaotic.
Kitsch. Obsessive. If Patrick Bateman’s shiny ’80s Manhattan penthouse/dungeon in American Psycho was a bachelor pad, man caves are the beer-bottled, bong-strewn apartments in films like Knocked Up and Superbad.
“It’s chaos,” said Mike, a 48-year-old content marketer in a tech company who lives in New Jersey with his wife and kids. While the upstairs of his house has a “very clean, modern aesthetic,” the downstairs (which he shared on r/mancave) is a cataclysm of his eclectic interests: a poker table, an Iron Maiden poster, a Mets placard, a sign that reads EAT DRINK WATCH FOOTBALL. “To me, that basement is the complete opposite of everything I believe in from a design aesthetic,” he said.
It is no coincidence that many man caves look like teenage bedrooms; they aren’t worlds apart. They are both rooms belonging to males who want to lock themselves away from the world, to cocoon themselves in soothing solitary pleasure. “This is my escape,” said Mike. “I can’t really share or go into those things elsewhere, like work, and with my kids and my wife,” he said.
“That’s my outlet for some of these things that I’m passionate about that no one else is.”
A New Masculinity Exits Hibernation
From the very beginning, man caves have been defined in terms of their resistance to femininity. The phrase was first used in the Toronto Star in 1992, when Joanne Lovering conjured up a “cave of solitude secured against wife intrusion,” marked by “musty smells and a few strategic cobwebs.”
That year, John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus popularized the man cave as a metaphor for the privacy and solitude that all men crave. “Men have had an identity problem since the women’s movement,” Sam Martin, author of Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory told the Denver Post in 2007. “Our premise is that women have control of the look and the feel of the house and that left guys wanting more.”
But for nearly all the Redditors I spoke with, the concept of masculinity—at least the old-fashioned sort—didn’t feel that important to them. Everyone shared their man cave with their partners, friends, and/or kids. and surprisingly, most of them couldn’t stand the term man cave. “I don’t like that word,” said Mike. “I think it should be just a personality cave.” Keefer didn’t like the hang-up on gender altogether. In an era in which more and more people are identifying outside the male/female binary, hypergendered language can feel outdated, redundant, and fundamentally cringe. “Masculinity, to me, just means: ‘Do you identify as a dude? Then you’re a dude, cool,’ ” Keefer said.
The idea of curating a space that was intentionally masculine did resonate with Aryn, a 28-year-old stay-at-home dad. He’d lived with his mom most of his adult life, in a home filled with decorative items like rock collections and glassware, which often made Aryn feel claustrophobic. When he eventually moved out, it was important for him to stay “as far away from absolutely useless objects as possible.”
It was an interesting point. During the hotboxing years, I developed an obsession with collecting tiny porcelain boxes, too small to fit anything inside, apart from a couple of rings, earrings, or coins (my friends now kindly joke that I would have been bullied if I’d gone to their secondary schools). I was likely influenced by my mum, who manically collected brightly colored clay pomegranates, and would impulse-buy things like Technicolor china lizards for £50, “just because.” Meanwhile, r/femalelivingspace is overflowing with decorative items—ornate candlesticks, baroque framed mirrors, fluffy poodle-like pillows. Was it that simple: The less practical an object is, the more it is coded as feminine?
Aryn lives with mental illness and finds that filling his space with functional items helps with his mental health. “When I wake up, I know that I have something fun to do that I have not done before,” he said. “It’s the only place I feel safe and it’s the only place that I’m excited to go to when I walk in.” Today, he spends most of his time in his man cave, which is filled with posters, toys, and a movie collection—all the things he wanted but couldn’t afford as a child.
Aryn felt uplifted by the encouragement he received when he shared photos of his home on r/mancave, and this was something that felt true to the thread as a whole. Amid the roasting sessions were frequent flickers of softness, veiled moments of companionship and vulnerability. One 17-year-old boy fretted that he needed to make his room more manly after a girl said it looked feminine. “Looks fantastic mate,” a Redditor reassured him. “I’d leave it as is and not worry about it, it’s your space to be comfortable in.”
Unlike other social media platforms, such as TikTok, Reddit has an overwhelmingly male usership (63.6 percent), a difference that is possibly attributable to site users’ anonymity, which provides a space for men to share opinions and anxieties without the judgment of others. “That’s my only way of talking to anybody,” said Aryn. “I asked them for advice, which I would never do under any other circumstances.”
While Aryn enjoys a masculine aesthetic, he loves sharing it with his wife—buying her a Blu-ray boxed set, action figures, and Lego sets which sit alongside his collections. These days, he spends hours playing in his man cave with his daughter, filled with nostalgia. “It’s super important for me to have her growing up with the things that I grew up with,” he said. “I don’t force anything on her, of course, because—masculine and feminine, who really cares?”
After the Euros ended, my boyfriend decided to sell the PerfectDraft beer machine on eBay. It was by no means a grand gesture of identity reckoning. The machine was simply less practical than he’d imagined. It took hours to cool down the keg of Stella, and even when it did, it only poured a few pints. He was on to the next product: a luxe Herman Miller office chair, kitted out with adaptable features for ultimate comfort.
As much as I had (condescendingly) loved the idea of men decking out their caves as being some masturbatory show of their manhood, it seemed that the majority of man-cavers were simply influenced by practicality. How could they make their space best suit their interests and physical needs? What would make them more comfortable? And, to be fair, my boyfriend might like shiny tech and expensive office chairs, but his bed sheets? Those are printed with huge pink and orange poppies.
