the boys' room

after ten years writing and researching about girls' bedroom culture, I finally have to know: why do boys live in trash heaps?

I’ve spent the past ten years writing a book about girls and their bedrooms. I have a lot to say about our bedrooms, so much that I spent eight years getting my Ph.D. trying to say it (true story). And then I spent this past year trying to say it in a different way, without all the imposter syndrome and pandering that academia invites in like the devil.

But while I’ve been writing and rewriting that book, I can’t help but look, occasionally, into a mirror world: a world that seems to be the opposite of the one I am writing about.

The boys’ room.

At first, I didn’t want to look. I wasn’t interested in these rooms. Girl mess has something magical about it. It’s artful even in its disarray, every object a secret world. Boys, on the other hand, tended to treat their bedrooms like they were just another space they were passing through. A dumping ground for actual trash where dust and change collected in the corners.

Boys never actually lived in their rooms like girls did. After all, they had the rest of the world to play in. And what use is the domestic to you when you own the world?

In his history of teen bedrooms in American culture, Jason Reid shows how public spaces were set apart from domestic spaces like bedrooms thanks to traditional gender roles. “Whereas the activities of girls were often oriented toward the lush parlors and private chambers of the middle-class Victorian home,” he writes, “boys were expected to come of age among the hills and rivers immortalized by Mark Twain and the clogged byways and bustling street corners of Horatio Alger.”¹

Simply put: boys belonged in the world; girls belonged at home.

But while I wrote my book about girls’ bedroom culture, the world began to change. Public life was moving online, and, as Kaitlyn Tiffany points out in her book about fangirls and the Internet, so many of our social digital spaces with their emphasis on curation, aesthetics, and blurring the line between private life and public, began to resemble girls’ bedrooms.

“The latest innovation in bedroom culture,” she writes, “is to be fourteen, sitting in your room, making an Instagram account dedicated to cataloguing the clothes that another girl wore while she was dancing on TikTok, also in her room.”²

The social Internet is much more domestic in nature than life offline, where adults go out and have jobs and compete for resources and food. But as the Internet became the space where we more and more of us carry out our lives, make our money, find our partners, try to be our authentic selves, the gendered conventions that long defined living and working and finding love and communicating with one another and raising families shifted, too.

Women either cosplaying or genuinely living the traditional values of hearth and home as tradwives on social media are now making more money online than CEOs. Last month, when I returned to the states after living abroad, I was stopped by a boarder security guard who wanted to talk about Sophie Rain, the young OnlyFans creator who revealed that she makes $4 million a month from her content.

“I only make $40k a year doing this shit,” he said, gesturing at the long line waiting to cross into this imaginary border we had agreed existed in the belly of the Chicago O’Hare airport. “Should be illegal — making that kind of money for doing nothing.”

I wanted to say to him that this was what we had all agreed upon when the lockdowns in 2020 finally shut us inside — all of us together: that there was no more real world, only the ones we created inside our screens.

But I wanted to get back into the country more, so I just nodded and smiled.

“Is it hard to date without a door?” the girl, dressed in a suit and holding a microphone, asks the boy whose bedroom she is in.

The camera lingers on a door-shaped hole in the wall that is partially obstructed by…I’m not even sure what exactly the large slab covered in graffiti shoved into the mouth of the wood-be doorway actually is.

“No, not really,” the boy shrugs. “I mean…maybe.”

This is Boy Room, a TikTok series hosted by comedian Rachel Coster that “investigates boys’ rooms” through an MTV-Cribs style tour that ends in Coster making practical suggestions (buying a dresser for clothes instead of keeping them in a large plastic storage container; washing dirty sheets and using a duvet cover; replacing the fitted sheet one man has hanging from a single nail over his window with an actual curtain) to make the room more habitable.

And this is Tom’s room. Tom isn’t really a boy, but he is in the sense of that meme comparing one’s parents in their 30s (buying a house, raising a child, having a job) to “me in my 30s” (disheveled, sleepless, owning nothing). Tom is 35. Tom owns his house in Philly. Tom tells us that he doesn’t know how many people have keys to his house and that is why his floors are covered in trash and the home looks like a construction site taken over by squatters.

Tom’s room, while very bad, is not the worst room featured on Boy Room. That room belongs to a 32-year-old man in Williamsburg who wanted only to be known as “Middle Part.”

Middle Part answers the door to his basement apartment drinking from a jar of pickle juice.

“His room looks like the basement of a suburban child whose mom is extremely lenient,” Coster tells us as the camera pans over bright blue walls that bear poorly spray painted upside down crosses as well as his name (“Middle Part”) scrawled over his bed “like he’s Bart Simpson.”

Middle Part doesn’t have a lot of things — WiFi or a computer or a job. But he does have a copy of bell hook’s All About Love, a Rose Vibrator, an issue of Zap Comics, and Narcan, all of which do seem like they would be useful items to have in such a place.

“I think he thinks he’s flirting,” babyspice30 writes in the comments.

Something is wrong.

It would be easy to look at the boys’ rooms on Boy Room and laugh at how they defy all convention and logic, particularly the logical arrangement of space (as Coster declares after noting that none of Aidan’s furniture is full flush to the wall because he “needs to throw stuff behind there”: “I don’t know if that’s how space works!”). It would also be easy to look at all the empty beer cans and other refuse and diagnose these boys as depressed, alcoholics, lazy, or some combination of the three.

But I can’t help but look at their mess and its abjection and see something else, something going so wrong within and without that a 35 year old man would rather live in a place whose predominant aesthetic is “construction zone” or a basement that smells like cigarettes than go up into the waking world and participate in it.

There exists a group of men — all grown, all in their mid 30s to late 40s and even older — who went into their childhood bedrooms and did not come back out.

Hikikomori is a strange word — a verb that literally translates to “pulling inward, being confined,” now used throughout Japan to describe the phenomenon of adults who withdraw from the world, isolating themselves in their bedrooms. The hikikomori are mostly men, some of whom had jobs or even families before choosing to opt out of the world. Now, they keep to their rooms, refusing to leave for months and years at a time.

Japan is something of a mirror world to America. Whereas our economic problems began in the late 2000s with the bursting of a housing bubble that kicked off a global financial crisis, Japan had already undergone a financial meltdown tied to their own housing market in the 1990s.

The Lost Decade quickly grew to decades, driving men who had once found their identity and purpose as part of the workforce inside, into their bedrooms, never to come out again. Sometimes, these men returned to their childhood homes, relying on aging parents to take care of them. But as they, too, began to grow old, as parents died or family members stopped checking up on them, the hikikomori began to die alone, surrounded only by their books and papers and rotting food and plastic bags of recycling they never took out.

In the images of the hikikomori bedrooms, I find some of the same magic as I do in the images of the girls’ bedrooms I’ve spent the past decade writing about. I remain fascinated by how the physical objects we surround ourselves with have a tendency to compound our stories, reducing our lives down to a stack of books we once loved or small trinkets of affection given to us by lovers and friends. I am reminded of a friend of mine who passed away at his desk — writing no doubt because he was a writer. His body wasn’t found for several days despite the fact that he knew many, many people, was active in his community, and was even carrying on an affair with a married woman who was known to throw lavish parties to which we were all invited.

When I arrived at his house a week after he died to help sort through his things, I couldn’t help but hold each book he had collected over the years and wonder at it, an archive of passion he had spent a lifetime on.

There is a tangle of social and economic reasons that led to the rise of the hikikomori, a population estimated to number over half a million adults. Not all of these reasons translate easily or readily to Western sensibilities. But let me try to explain one.

The hikikomori represent a rejection, a refusal, a resistance. It is not just shame that keeps them inside, but a rejection of the system that made them feel shame in the first place. Their existence is a resistance of a country that prizes work above all else that, when things got tough, forced them out of the world they were told was theirs. To live as a hikikomori is not just to go inside and hide from the world. It’s a refusal of the world, a total disinterest in the thing you once helped build.

Believe what you will, but the hikikomori do not exist in America. Men here cannot go quietly back into their childhood bedrooms, at least not without some violence. Their refusal of society is not ascetic in nature but a roaring discontent that surely becomes everyone else’s problem.

But I do catch glimpses of the hikikomori in the memes and funny videos disparaging the state of the modern American male’s bedroom — how bad it’s gotten in there, how abject. Why would you lie with trash day in and day out if not because you refuse to clean it up?

In one episode of Boy Room, we tour the bedroom of Dan, a 25-year-old who somehow has a posh West Village apartment all to himself. While his bedroom is furnished with castoff cardboard (“his shoe rack is a crumpled box”), the living room is empty save for bottles of Vodka and a fold-out card table with a few vintage books, including a very old copy of a Bible wrapped in plastic, the provenance of which remains unknown.

Being in Dan’s apartment “feels like a roman palace,” but one that has fallen into ruin. In the comments, it becomes clear that Dan’s refusal to actually make the space habitable is an indication of his own privilege. “Does Dan know he lives here,” asks one commenter. Another writes: “How do you secure an NYC apartment with natural lighting and Roman columns but then fail to furnish it?” And finally: “If his rich mom and dad knew how little he respected the place they paid for.”

These men are caught between worlds. Dan, Tom, Middle Part, every guy I’ve dated with a mattress on the floor. The disrepair of their bedrooms could be read as a rejection of the domesticity they have been forced into as life moves online, one that is more passive aggressive in tone and execution when compared to the quiet martyrdom of Japan’s Lost Generations. They are rejecting the world that is becoming, but they are not going back into their rooms quietly. Rome wasn’t built in a day but it crumbled for centuries — lines to a song I can’t remember.

And we would all do well to look a little closer at these young men and their will to dismantle, so we can decide what we will create in their ruins.

oh my FUCKING GOD YOU GUYS. We fucking did it. We made it through another year. We wrote and we showed strangers our insides and we were really, really fucking brave. I’m proud of us, seriously.

I don’t know what else to say about this year because the lows were low and the highs were those quiet moments where I was out in the woods out of range of cell service. I said it in my last post but I’ll say it again here: I am endlessly grateful for this space, to have found readers who want to deeply engage with my work, to have found a community of other writers who give so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Now is as good a time as ever to let you know about a little secret I’ve been keeping (paid subscribers already know!!) — which is I’ve decided to collect all my longer essays from this year plus an essay that’s too personal for the Internet plus a short story and self-publish a little Internet Bedroom collection. It’ll be out on my birthday, March 7th, 2025.

As always, a few shoutouts for those that inspired this essay:

• first and foremost to my husband, who was the first person to watch Perfect Blue with me on one of our first dates which were really just these long hangouts that neither of us wanted to leave and eventually, we never did. Mr. Me-Mania was the initial inspiration behind this essay even though he doesn’t appear in it.

• .,¤°✿princess babygirl
  ‘s darkly funny and incisive column “boys” began in an era where the substack scroll was saturated with girlhood essays and debates on girlhood essays and crossed my mind many times when I put this essay in the chamber.

• earlier this year,

  Jessica DeFino
  also noted that boyhood was trending — at least its aesthetics were.

Inspired by my substack pal

Alex Lewis

, if you aren’t into committing to a paid subscription just yet, I’m going to link to my venmo here in case you liked what you read enough to tip me.

And that’s it for me and for Internet Bedroom in the year of our lord 2024. I’ll see you guys on the other side I hope, and until then, know that I love ya <3

1. Jason Reid, Get Out of My Room: A History of Teen Bedrooms in America, (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 3.

2. Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 251.