‘Man Caves’ door de ogen van een feminist

Ugh… Video here:

“Throughout history men have always created personal spaces where they retreat to be amongst friends. Lately, these places, called “man caves”, have become a boom industry, with often more than $50,000 (£31,772) being spent on furnishing a single “cave”.

Jeff Wilser, co-author of “The Man Cave Book”, talks to the BBC about the forces behind these hideaways, why men are so protective of them, and why the variety of such caves is so immense.

“It’s basically about finding what your one passion is, what your hobby is, and building a space that does that passion justice,” says Mr Wilser.”

Because women don’t have hobbies and passions.

Because women don’t have tough days at work.

So, a man deserves his leisure space. Every other room in the house involves women’s work (housework, childcare) whereas the man-cave belongs to the man only. There are no woman-caves because a woman’s time is not seen as exclusively hers. A woman’s time is always possible to interrupt with domestic and child stuff. It is assumed that whatever a woman is doing, she must be available to domestic demands at all times.

It makes me laugh – and by “laugh”, I mean “barf” – when these guys say that the rest of the house belongs to the woman because that is the way patriarchy wants it: the wife, in the domestic sphere, fulfilling the expressive role, and the husband, in the social sphere, fulfilling the instrumental role (thanks due to Talcott Parsons giving some sociological luster to that little piece of patriarchal BS and naturalizing so thoroughly that it won’t go away).

This goes back to the idea that men are oppressed by domesticity and should be therefore exempt from its demands and be able to retreat from it. The very fact of calling it a “cave” sounds like this is where doodz get to get in touch with their inner, natural, and oh-so repressed caveman, in all its raw, somewhat childish, and undomesticated masculinity.

And let’s not forget that the man-cave also has to do with the growth in size of the average American house, at the same time that family size shrunk. So, children have their bedrooms (and less and less do we have siblings sharing bedrooms, it is more and more individualized); fathers can get their man-cave. The only person not having an individual space is actually the wife / mother. Her space is either shared (bedroom) or a collective space (living room / kitchen) but the whole house is her space, right? So it’s all good. Because still to this day, a woman is a first and foremost a social being whose existence is not individualized and whose fulfillment is supposed to come through dedication to others whereas other members of the household are entitled to their privacy and individuality.

Also, the man-cave from hell:

“A man in China has been detained on suspicion of keeping six women as sex slaves in underground rooms for two years and killing two of them, a state-owned newspaper has reported.

The Southern Metropolis Daily said that over the past two years, Li Hao allegedly kidnapped women who worked as hostesses in karaoke bars and locked them in two small rooms he had dug beneath a rented basement in Luoyang city in Henan province.

The secret rooms were located in a residential complex away from his home, where his wife and son lived unaware of the alleged kidnappings, the report said, citing unnamed police sources.

A publicity official for the city’s police department confirmed that a man named Li Hao who works for the city’s technological supervision bureau had been taken into custody. The official declined to provide further details, citing an ongoing investigation.

The newspaper reported that Li was a former firefighter and it claimed he regularly raped the women and would give them food only once every two days to keep them physically weak. It described the rooms the women ate, slept and defecated in as dank and smelly.

Over time, some of the captives started competing with one another for his attention, the report said, and two of them ended up fighting. Li allegedly killed one of them with the help of another woman, the paper said.

He also allegedly killed one of the other women who was said to have been “disobedient”, the report said, adding that he buried both bodies in the corner of one of the rooms.”

How is that for passion and hobby? See? It’s the same: he probably saw the home as the place for his wife and son and needed his own space to truly express his masculine nature away from domestic demands.