{"id":464,"date":"2016-08-31T09:35:30","date_gmt":"2016-08-31T13:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/?p=464"},"modified":"2016-08-31T09:35:30","modified_gmt":"2016-08-31T13:35:30","slug":"man-caves-and-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/2016\/08\/31\/man-caves-and-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Caves and Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Guy Studies Man Caves for a Living; Here\u2019s What He\u2019s\u00a0Learned<\/a><\/h2>\n

There’s a lot of good stuff in here, but the most interesting thing to me was that a man caves are\u00a0an aspirational space driven by loneliness. If you build it they will come.<\/p>\n

\n

Almost every guy tells me he\u2019ll use it to \u201chave people over and entertain.\u201d The conversation gets awkward, though, when I ask him who he\u2019ll have over. Because often, the men will explain, \u201cI don\u2019t have time to have friends over right now. I work a lot and I have children, so I don\u2019t really have friends. But eventually this will be a neighborhood hangout for guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

I think it plays into the idea of man caves being a fantasy\u200a\u2014\u200aa fantasy of male friendship and camaraderie. Research shows that men don\u2019t have as many friends as women, and the kinds of friendships they do have are much less meaningful than those available to women. So maybe part of what they\u2019re building with a man cave is a fantasy of different relationships with men.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Maybe man caves are a symptom of\u00a0the loss of third places<\/a> in our lives. We build home bars because our zoning laws prevent us from putting a neighborhood pub actually in a neighborhood. All these people are building a shared space in their home with no one to share it.<\/p>\n

The piece\u00a0also says a bit about the amount of control men feel they have over their spaces as well as\u00a0their awareness of women’s experience of space in the home.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019ve asked straight men what role a man cave plays in their relationship, the most common answer I get is, \u201cI feel like the whole house is hers. And this is a space for me.\u201d When I follow up with, \u201cOkay, but do you think she has spaces in the house as well?\u201d They typically respond, \u201cAbsolutely! She has tons of spaces that are essentially hers.\u201d When I press them on which rooms those are, they list off rooms associated with domestic labor, not with leisure\u200a\u2014\u200athe kitchen, the laundry room, etc.<\/p>\n

I think some of this has do with the fact that men feel as though the domestic space isn\u2019t something they have ownership of. I also think it\u2019s a result of men getting more leisure time than women in heterosexual relationships.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Me, I don’t have a man cave. I just have a basement office that I can hang ugly clown paintings, that has my work computer, gaming PC, some various computers I tinker with, a kegerator\u2026 OK, but it’s not a man cave because it’s not\u00a0finished yet\u2026<\/p>\n

Photo credit: Cory Doctorow (CC BY-SA)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Guy Studies Man Caves for a Living; Here\u2019s What He\u2019s\u00a0Learned There’s a lot of good stuff in here, but the most interesting thing to me was that a man caves are\u00a0an aspirational space driven by loneliness. If you build it they will come. Almost every guy tells me he\u2019ll use it to \u201chave people … Continue reading Man Caves and Men<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[70,71,72],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-links","tag-man-cave","tag-masculinity","tag-third-place","post_format-post-format-link"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":517,"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions\/517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/george.hotelling.net\/91percent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}