A man cave is a room or outbuilding, typically a basement, garage, shed or spare room, that a man claims as his own retreat, decorates as he pleases and uses for hobbies, watching sport, playing cards or simply being left in peace. The term is usually good-humoured, poking gentle fun at the occupant as a throwback to his caveman ancestors, though it also crops up with a sharper edge in commentary on domestic gender politics.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘man cave’?
‘Man cave’ is a recent North American coinage, and the joke behind it is obvious enough: the modern male, denied an actual cave, drags his creature comforts into the basement instead. The earliest example so far found in print comes from Canada. On 21st March 1992 the Toronto Star ran a light-hearted column by Joanne Lovering about how the sexes divide up the family home, in which she pictured the husband holed up happily among his tools in the basement and proposed a name for the territory: “Let’s call the basement, man cave.”
The idea, if not the exact phrase, was given an enormous push the same year by the American relationship counsellor John Gray, whose Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus was published by HarperCollins in 1992 and went on to sell more than 15 million copies. Gray’s theory was that men under stress withdraw to their ‘cave’ to mull things over alone, while women prefer to talk. His cave was a state of mind rather than a room, but with that many copies in circulation the image of a man retreating into his cave became a commonplace of 1990s pop psychology, and it was a short step from the metaphorical cave to a physical one.
The phrase went fully mainstream in the United States during the home-improvement boom of the 2000s, when converting a garage or basement into a dedicated male den became a recognised DIY project with its own magazines, retail ranges and television coverage. The DIY Network series Man Caves, in which the former NFL player Tony Siragusa and the contractor Jason Cameron built themed retreats for householders, premiered in 2007 and ran until 2016. Rival labels such as ‘manspace’ and ‘mantuary’ were floated around the same time but never caught on.
The impulse itself is hardly new. British and Australian men had been disappearing to the garden shed for generations before anyone thought to call it a cave, and the underlying sentiment, that a man’s home ought to contain at least one corner that is entirely his, is as old as ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’.