>>24673110
Boys are not mere cavemen. Unlike with girls, the games of boys constantly redefine themselves with age, tending towards ever greater complexity. Rules-based games are strongly preferred, almost infallibly with clear outcomes, winners, losers. The rules are seen as existing independently from any player: what male play-group has not seen a member try to bend them for some social benefit, only to be mocked as effeminate, implicitly or explicitly? This meta-structure remains stable while the games themselves constantly evolve, reflecting an ever-scaling preference for abstraction. Eventually, the games themselves solidify into socially validated forms, such as sports for strong boys or chess for weak ones. Players pick favorite games and/or categories and stick to them. Yet the meta-structure does not stop evolving there, even if the greater abstracting powers of men leads healthy ones to enjoy explicit play long after healthy women discard it: this pattern of rule-bound competition becomes the skeleton of male society.

There exists a wealth of implication here in which other writers might linger. For one, the male faculty of abstraction is almost certainly responsible for the common incidence of paraphernalic fetishism in unhealthy men. Compare its near-nonexistence in women unless consistently socially rewarded. Another emergent phenomenon: observe the relatively large social networks and egalitarian friendships of all but the unhealthiest adult women, and compare the healthy adult man working in isolation, with a small cadre of close collaborators. Observe the ease with which two men might converse on one’s area of shared expertise and then never speak again; compare the personal tone of nearly any female conversation and the immediate punishment provoked when a participant abstracts away from common knowledge, or indeed reveals any quality not shared by the group. What could account for such consistent patterns other than radically different psychology? But we must not linger here.

Broadly, we will from this point forward consider men as powerful, specialized engines of abstraction and competition, and women as creators and enforcers of social norms, with the object of harmony among themselves (Eagly and Wood 1999; Archer and Coyne 2005).

Traditional societies have, by diverse means and to similar ends, recognized the complementary nature of these divergent natures, and striven to make the most out of both of them. The Romans, Athenians, Mesoamericans, and Chinese all upheld the army as the center of public life, accessible only to men; women occupied their own spheres, separate both from the danger of martial life and the rewards of public life, seen by all but the most unhealthy and conniving among them as masculine vainglory, inherently without value to women (Keegan 1993; Blundell 1995).