>>24673108
I use “equal” here to mean “alike in purpose and worth,” as only things like in purpose can be like in worth. It is pointless to call a mahogany chair and reading lamp “equal,” as the two complement each other to achieve a common end, and such is the argument I wish to illustrate for men and women. Pedantic readers may note here that I am dispensing with the Enlightenment notion of “inherent human worth,” an unfalsifiable notion all too easily muddled and which has contributed not insignificantly to our current predicament.

Let us examine the play of young boys and girls, a domain in which we see, with little adulteration and wholly unsympathetic to our ideologies, the bare nature of man. Study after study has confirmed a strong, cross-cultural division, resistant to attempts at integration at home, school, or elsewhere (Maccoby and Jacklin 1987; Whiting and Edwards 1988; Lever 1978).

Girls typically segregate themselves into single-sex groups earlier. These girls are found to favor large group play, almost always narrative, with members taking on and occasionally exchanging set roles. Decisions are made by consensus, and the rare dissenter may be punished with strong emotional reactions from conforming participants, and socially ostracized thereafter. Individuals must be punished for standing out: the group is more important than the sum of them all. This pattern of play is stable across age groups: while participants and roles complexify, the game does not. Eventually, it ceases altogether to be play: around puberty, it becomes the social world of women.

If the play of boys were merely the play of girls with the addition of roughhousing, this loud disturbance to a social world that so favors conformity would probably be in itself sufficient to classify the sexes as different species. But it is deeper than that.

Very young boys, as anyone who remembers his boyhood or has been responsible for one can attest, play far cruder games than girls, often consisting of pushing, shoving, various physical bursts of activity. A female onlooker of any age might recognize in this only chaos, and indeed, compared to the activity of girls of the same age, it is often lacking in sophistication. Yet it is not chaos: the rule is of every boy for himself, with rank constantly altered and reinforced by the law of conquest, retaliation, revenge. Indeed, it is often at this age that a man’s social rank, unfashionable to admit but existing nonetheless, becomes defined and fixed for life.