he replied that Shabby and Scooby had no weapons. Tracking an enemy without a weapon obviously is foolhardy and dangerous. Upon further inquiry, I learned that many little boys shared this one’s opinion. Unbeknownst to me, Scooby-Doo may have greater appeal to little girls. Little girls aren’t afraid of enemies, as long as there are mature adults around.
Boys realize that mature adults are no match for a real enemy, unless the adults have weapons.
What a relief to know that even if you are by yourself with no weapons, Superman or Batman or Action Man can come to the rescue. Older boys and young men around the world leave their families regularly to fight enemies and become superheroes to their communities and nations.
Gross Ghost of Fled Dreams,
The highly successful Japanese Pokemon card series presents another example, with cards with names such as Enraged Muka Muka, Infernal Incinerator, Creeping Doom Mantra, Malice Doll of Demise, Indomitable Fighter Lei Lei, Cyber Archfiend, Terrorking Salmon, Tribe-Infecting Virus, Nightmare’s Steelcage, Invitation to a Dark Sleep, Mad Sword Beast, Dark Driceratops, Gross Ghost of Fled Dreams, Pitch-Black Warwolf, and Dragon Zombie.
Massively multiple online role-playing computer games, such as the hugely popular World of Warcraft, allow many players armed only with a computer to cooperate from around the world to hunt down and kill one another, team against team, in completely realistic contexts
The ratio of young men (15–29 years) to older men (30+ years) in a country predicts quite accurately war-related fatalities. In their study of 88 countries from all over the world, Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener [51] showed that as this ratio of young to older men increases, the number of fatalities during conflicts increases enormously.
Both players also acknowledge one another’s good shots when the shots truly reflect superior skill. In the ideal matchup, each man appears to believe that he is just a bit better than his opponent, but that his opponent is actually very good, ensuring, of course, that he himself is even better.
From infancy through old age, human males get pleasure from overtly competing against their male peers. Girls and women don’t.
boys and young men state they are more willing to resolve a conflict with their same-sex friend. Girls and women report they would rather find a replacement than reconcile with someone who hurt them badly.
a young man will sacrifice his life, most immediately for the other young men in his group who are standing right next to him in battle. That is what his emotions tell him [1, 17, 18]. That is what I believe allows his genes to survive. If he survives, his genes will be more likely to be passed down to his children. If he dies but his community survives, then at least some of his genes, those residing in his closest family members, will be passed down to his nieces and nephews.
When an enemy looms, everything changes. Life becomes stressful for everyone. Time and resources must be rerouted. Children are left more on their own. As a result, boys have more access to other boys and fewer constraints on their play fighting, enemy targeting, and intergroup competitive play.
This suggests that a human male’s brain comes prewired to exhibit behaviors critical to victory in battle that can be modified by the environment depending on the community’s needs. Just as a man’s testosterone levels diminish when he marries a woman and diminish even further when he has children [24], the same process may occur with young boys.
boys will practice play fighting, enemy detection, and one-on-one competition with their male peers unless they are restrained by the presence of caring and relatively stress-free mothers or other relatives or caring adults.
Boys raised on kibbutzim were more likely to participate in the riskiest and most violent aspects of military service. A full 54% of them volunteered for units with fighting requirements, whereas only 16% of boys raised with their own families did so. Boys raised on kibbutzim also displayed the most valor in battle. It is no accident that these were boys who were raised with other boys and away from their mothers.
I asked Belgian children, adolescents, and adults whether family or friends are better sources of help [55]. At every age, compared with girls and women, boys and men thought that friends would be more useful than parents. In contrast, girls and women thought that parents would be just as helpful as friends.
I believe that girls need to be really close friends, almost like family, in order to relax in one another’s company. Boys enjoy themselves more easily, even when they are not close friends.
A study in the US Midwest found that bullying followed a predictable pattern. High-status boys bullied low-status boys. In turn, low-status boys bullied high-status girls
If a boy did show his emotions, his male friends would react by making fun of him, telling jokes, or ignoring or distracting him. The victim of these attacks appreciated this: Being made fun of helped him to calm down. According to these boys, this type of reaction showed that their friends cared about them. Many boys taunt one another not to bully each other but to help each other out, to teach each other how to deal with the world most beneficially. The only exception these boys made was when a relative died. Only then was some expression of pain permissible.
By competing to have the most important information to provide, a man improves his whole group’s performance.
The competitive instinct in males, however, provides a valuable avenue for leadership selection. Boys and men devote their precious time to figuring out who is best at the most varied and seemingly unimportant pursuits. Should a leader be required to accomplish that task, however, they all know immediately who the star is.
The most attractive male peers are those who are physically and emotionally tough and self-confident and who follow the rules and demonstrate valuable expertise.
If you belong to a boys’ group, your allies may not remember your birthday, but they know very well if you can run fast, hit well, respect rules, and make good decisions. They may be competitors, but when things get tough, they’re also the ones who will protect you and root for you, and maybe even die for you.
When a mother with many resources raising seemingly perfect children becomes obsessed with seemingly trivial issues such how strict to be, what type of schedule is best, who has the most friends, what are the best colors for clothes, and so forth, it can seem ridiculous. I believe, however, that women are guided by genes to worry, even when there is nothing serious to worry about. It does not feel comfortable to admit that everything is okay, unless a major disaster has just been averted. The push to worry is strong and persistent. Anxiety is part of being a woman.
Because fear signals potential danger, women should be particularly sensitive to nonverbal use. Indeed, women’s advantage over men in decoding nonverbal cues is greatest with fear [40]. The same logic should also apply to expressions of anger by individuals, although this is more difficult to study. Anger signals potential threat. Therefore, women should be particularly attuned to nonverbal cues of anger, since this would allow them to escape attack more rapidly.
Put another way, divulging personal vulnerabilities provides an insurance policy against potential future attacks. For girls or women to remain friends, they must be able to reassure each other that they have no intention of usurping the other’s status, stealing her food, or taking off with her male romantic partner. Females reveal their vulnerability as a sign of their honest intentions not to compete, not to try to harm the other by taking something from her.
women of all ages are well aware that their friends will not be happy should they advertise, or even mention, their personal successes.
When two familiar women pass in the street, they must smile. If not, the one not smiled at begins to ruminate. “Why didn’t she smile at me?” “Did I do something wrong?” “Is my dress on backward?” “Who does she think she is, anyway?” “I remember another time she did something unpleasant.” “My other friend, Jane, thinks she’s not very nice, and after all maybe she’s right. This proves it.” And so it goes.
another female requires a better territory, more food, or assistance fighting a competitor or predator, a high-status female can lend a helping hand, or mouth or foot.
If another female requires a better territory, more food, or assistance fighting a competitor or predator, a high-status female can lend a helping hand, or mouth or foot.
If another man is trying to compete, he generally does it in public. He openly bests his competitor, then helps himself to his competitor’s food—or his wife.
Should a woman achieve success, she may never mention it [42, 44]. As I described in chapter 5, there is a strong female taboo against discussing personal success. Instead of speaking of their many achievements, successful women focus on something that is not going well, some weakness that is of concern. There is always something that is not right.
“Anyone could have done as well. I work so hard because I know I’m really not very smart.…” Anne thinks, as do many women, that if she competes with other women she will be abandoned. Her fears of loneliness and isolation, of being thought by other women to be self-absorbed and selfish, overwhelm her.
large survey showed that female bosses are more likely than male bosses to make women physically sick as well as emotionally distressed
Their favorite hobby was having a boyfriend. Jenny wasn’t really interested in a boyfriend, but she still like hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of make-up and miniskirts.
Probably almost every mother who has ever lived has screamed in her home and commanded, insulted, made fun of, and otherwise acted superior to her family members at times.
Even where fathers take care of children, many are not certain how old their child is, what day their child was born, where to find their child’s doctor, or the name of their child’s teacher [14]. None of these fathers, however, has any memory problems when it comes to recalling the names, ages, and statistics of the players on their favorite sports team.
a careful inspection shows that fathers can be distractible when it comes to children. While a father may dutifully push his baby’s carriage, his attention is easily distracted by a pretty girl walking by, deliberations with fellow fathers about last night’s baseball game, or a new business deal.
Boys, regardless of whether they are educated, grow up to be men, who just don’t invest as much in their families. Often, men will choose to spend their money on alcohol and tobacco or leisure activities as much as on their families. As the UNICEF millennium report [25] on the importance of education to girls states: Some 121 million children are not in school, most of them
I always suggest that my female students, who attend a college that is predominantly female, simply dispense with monogamy. Rather, they should either live together with their children or join in a polygynous (several co-wives, one husband) marriage in some other country. Living in a harem makes sense. There are many advantages. First, all the co-wives can share an excellent man; none of them has to settle for second best. None has to fear never marrying at all.
After one highly successful American woman after another sought treatment from her in her clinical practice, the psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller [152] concluded that for emotional health, a woman requires a lifelong relationship.
Unsurprisingly, men are more likely to get divorced when they have been married longer, whereas the opposite is true for women
A girl then undergoes a psychological transformation from reliance upon her mother as authority figure to becoming the authority figure for her daughters, and perhaps even her grandchildren. Boys and men live embedded in a world of relative equals, mostly unrelated to one another, who combat the enemy and join in activities together, competing over small variations in status.
As researchers who have studied hundreds of adolescents concluded more than 50 years ago, female friends are simply not as important to one another as they think they are
In business and science, high-status women invest less than high-status men in lower-status same-sex individuals [181, 182, 4]. Recently, my colleagues and I asked young women and men how much money they would share with a less powerful same-sex ally with whom they had worked on a joint project. Women gave much less than men did
Fathers needn’t bother with these complex calculations. They know the mother of their children will almost always be there for the children. Of course, around the world, stealing another man’s wife or girlfriend is probably the number one cause of murder within a community [192], even in hunter-gatherer societies [22]. But a man doesn’t worry as much about this, as long as his wife can care for his children.