Snowboard boots on the kitchen table. A steering wheel in the bedroom. And clothes absolutely everywhere, with no system to determine which, if any, are clean.
These are just some of the sights that indicate you are in a boys’ room. It’s a bedroom with no form and little function, inhabited by a grown man who doesn’t think much about either concept. The decor, if you can call it that, usually consists of arbitrary trinkets: a favorite old skateboard on the wall, a handful of childhood action figures on the windowsill. The ground is often difficult to see due to the density of piled up sneakers or trash. The best thing that can be said about the furniture is that there may be some; Otherwise, the resident sleeps on a bare mattress placed directly on the floor, with a single pillow and an uncovered duvet.
To an outsider, it may seem immature, even inhospitable. Now, comedian Rachel Coster is investigating the phenomenon for her TikTok/Instagram series boy’s room.
In each episode, a man in his late twenties or early thirties living in New York City offers his bedroom for an anthropological study. Coster snoops around the room and asks the children questions about their decor.
“What is that down there?” she asks Luke, 24, pointing to a dirty container next to a stool. “It’s a bottle of bleach,” he replies.
“What’s with the hat?” he asks Jerome, 32, pointing to a baseball cap under the bed. “That’s the cat’s hat,” he explains.
Some videos have become more surreal: one shows a windowless room with its resident’s nickname painted on the wall like in a horror movie; another boy is wearing a nightcap and has an empty condom box taped to the wall.
Coster below offers highly practical tips for improving your space. “My vision for Blake’s room is, if we get him, maybe a trash can,” she suggests. “I would put all the clothes that are on the floor on the shelves that are available.”
The boys in question mostly He seems serious and pleasant, if a little perplexed by the attention. As one Instagram commenter put it: “Blake seems like a really chill guy. “I think we would have a lot in common.”
The idea for Boy Room came from a friend of Coster’s who said his room was “scaring all the girls I’ve ever brought in.” She said she could help him fix it within hours. Just five weeks after the show’s release, Coster’s most-viewed video has 2.7 million views on TikTok, where Boy Room has more than 121,000 followers.
Perhaps that’s because he found such a rich topic: socializing, and especially dating, can mean exposure to a lot of unfamiliar homes and lifestyles. The domestic life of young people has received particular scrutiny. On TikTok, for example, users have identified “three quintessential New York apartments for boys” (the big brother of the frat, the “my dad has money” guy, and the guy with a fireplace that will hurt your feelings), and highlighted “Things in my boyfriend’s apartment that just make sense.” (example: a recovered fire hydrant, for some reason).
Why, exactly, are the boys’ rooms the way they are? Coster theorizes that girls are raised with the expectation that they will one day take care of their home, and they “watch each other” when it comes to cleanliness, while “when boys go into each other’s rooms, they are not like them”. , ‘Hey, buddy, why don’t you have more than one pillow?’” And, of course, there’s incessant advertising, she says: “Men are marketed to: ‘You need to be stronger. You need to be able to concentrate. You need to be able to stay tough.’ For girls, it’s: ‘You must be beautiful, clean, your house must be nice.’
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My partner, possibly trying to send a message, was the first to alert me about Boy Room. At just 39 years old, I’m almost a child and I have a room that I’m clearly told would qualify for the show. Coster kindly agreed to evaluate him via video chat, since I live on the other side of the country.
His first question was how do I cross my bedroom, since I have a TV stand at the foot of my bed and together they take up the entire length of the room. I explained that I had to climb up the bed to get to the closet. “Awesome,” she said. “And all your clothes are stored in the cubbies,” she said of the boxes in my closet where I keep my clothes (I don’t have a dresser, but I don’t need one because I have the cubbies).
He also looked at my pile of memories (previously an overflowing bag of memories). It’s where I keep things I can’t bear to throw away, like postcards, a magic wand from a Halloween costume from seven years ago, and a brochure from a hang gliding museum in Texas that I don’t remember going to. My grandfather’s electric chess is also in the pile. “Yeah, right where he’d want it,” Coster said. “How long has all that been there?”
“Since I moved here a year and a half ago, maybe?”
“And how often do you look at that stuff and say, ‘Wow, thank God I have this ‘Hoppy Easter’ card?”
Coster is “a big fan of throwing away things” that you don’t use regularly. “I’d really rather have my noise-cancelling headphones than a million letters from my parents,” he said before adding, “Maybe if they were dead, I’d feel differently.”
He also suggested I put the keepsakes in a chest, or at least organize the pile into smaller piles: “You’ll find they have a better shape than a lump on the side of your room.” His other key recommendation was to put back the posters that had fallen off my wall, but he thought it would be nice to vary the theme a bit. I suffer from what could be diagnosed as extreme Anglophilia and my posters include two maps of the United Kingdom, an old tube advert and a view of London from above. She said she would “feature maybe France or some other white European country that you’re excited about.”
In fact, I already have a discarded poster from France, but the simplicity of your other suggestions made me want to take action, which I did the following weekend: I rehung the posters and got rid of some of the more egregious memories , including a couple. of broken glasses in two monocles.
Coster understands that getting rid of things can be difficult. “I think sentimentality and calmness don’t go together, because if you’re always thinking about the past and trying to protect things, then it’s very difficult to stay in the present.” That said, straightening up can also be rewarding: “Every time I wake up to a clean room, I’m in total heaven.”
Boy Room is full of jokes, but what sets it apart from standard Internet trolling is its fundamental warmth. Yes, we laugh at these guys’ rooms, but Coster, who works with a small team that includes director/cinematographer/editor sexy damian, is very on the side of the boys. As she told a Boy Room customer: “None of this has to do with your personality. You are wonderful. “You just don’t know what you’re doing with your space.”
She, and by extension we, simply want the best for these men, starting with the ability to navigate from one side of the room to the other without stumbling. “My true wish is that everyone loves each other enough to take care of their space if they can,” she said.