Good thoughts on the man cave, Gimp. It's kind of funny - the two of us have an embarrassingly, excessively large house, and when we bought it, DH was so excited about the built-in man cave basement complete with wet bar. Fact is, he rarely goes down there, so I turned it into a home gym instead (barbells and iron plates are feminine, right?!). I think the female benefit of the man cave is that it's a place where the neon beer signs, hideous posters and taxidermy can be hidden from polite company without the man feeling like he's got no say in the household. But the man cave as a utilitarian place of creativity or at least attempts at building and repair, vs. sloth, drunkenness and NFL is well made.
There's nothing more feminine than weights. Have you seen how good a girl looks when she uses them? :)
You do bring up a good point: there's definitely an element of "instead of compromising on how the house looks, you do whatever to everything except my one place and I do whatever to that room." Complicated issue that is partly culture in the form of men not having the authority (jokes like "men picking out paint must be accompanied by wives" - don't get me wrong, hilarious, but still part of our culture) and partly culture that men just care less about that sort of thing ("you want teal? fine. red? don't care. curtains of that nature? okay.") and likely some individual bone-headedness ("it's teal, and that's final"). So the guy says: fine, but at least let me have this room. And that's why there's tacky neon and taxidermy: it's a form of rebellion. "I'm a man, I kill animals and have them stuffed, or someone else does and I buy it because guns are loud but cash is king."
A fair point indeed. Weird, but if we apparently have enough rooms to do that... well, we can. Houses got bigger.
I think pretty much every liquor-appreciating guy wants to have their own bar, and pretty much everyone of those guys with their own bar uses it once in a blue moon. A bar in a basement is ... well, it's a lot of work. You need to invite friends over often, establish it as a place to hang out... stock it with liquor, maybe wine, definitely beer. But then you need a fridge for the beer with freezer for ice (for jack and cokes, mind, not good whisky :), and then of course you put mixers into the fridge too. Now, a bar means serious business, not just pouring straight whisky or opening beer, so you justify it with the right stuff to make good drinks - liqueurs, bitters, infusions, and of course, standard bar ingredients. Luxardo cherries might last a long time, but limes and lemons and mint and whatever else, less so, so now you're buying new fruit regularly. And of course most beer will expire within three or maybe six months, so you need to drink and rotate that. And obviously you need prep tools - bar mats, cutting boards, knives, muddlers, jiggers, mixing spoons, shakers. You need glassware - beer glasses (and if you really like beer, now we're talking three or four styles of glasses, and maybe tasting glasses and paddles), wine glasses (and if you like wine, now you have glasses for red, for white, and if your wife gets into it maybe for champagne), lowballs, highballs, maybe separate water glasses if pint glasses aren't good enough, then you add martini glasses, maybe margarita glasses, and then you find stemless glasses for wine and/or cocktails so those too, and of course you can't forget dedicated whisky glasses. Maybe now you get a dishwasher there, too. And if you're a real man's man, you start brewing your own beer, and before you know it you've got a huge brew setup, and maybe cider and mead on the side. All this shit gets fucking expensive. Really fucking expensive, really fast.
Or, you could just not go down to the basement too often. Waste of a perfectly good bar.
That's the man cave in a nutshell. "All this shit gets fucking expensive." And then you don't use it because it's a bit of a hassle, or you use it for NFL as you said (despite probably having a fully functional living room with teevee that gets NFL on it.)
If I was tasked with creating a bar for a house during its design/construction, I would make the bar be part of the kitchen. All of your stuff is already there, and it's somewhere very accessible and you don't need to make a concentrated effort to convince people to go down into the basement.