Cabin Porn

A web site where readers around the world post large high-res pics of remote or abandoned cabins? Surely, it will never catch on? Yes it will – with 40,000 Facebook likes, and articles in The Times and Altantic Magazine, FreeCabinPorn has big arty photos – no ads and hundreds of reblogs. Check it out. Strange that the cabin pics rarely include any people – like a cautious publisher who does not want to risk turning off potential readers in the cover design, so this Web site is long on style and cannily short on content.

“The cabin has become shorthand for a whole complex of values and aspirations,” says The Atlantic: “of self-reliance, doing-it-yourself, living off the land and off the grid, using our bodies in simple, honest, manual labor — all the things that modern urbanites supposedly have lost.”

For most people, cabins have today become leisure homes, and as such, extensions of consumer society. They are material or imagined expressions of the lives we desire to live, but mostly done on the side, as a second home. There are some who chose to actually live in the cabin, but few leave society completely to become self-reliant modern homesteaders. Rather, this broad range of cabin lifestyles has become part of exurbia — suburbia’s manifest destiny.