Reputation Damage
Boys are concerned predominantly with threats to their group from the outside, according to Joyce Benenson’s 2014 book Warriors and Worriers. Their play centers around applying violence to defeat this external threat, which can be called “the Enemy” for convenience. Girls tend not to be very concerned about such an imaginary external force, much less imagining using violence against it. Girls are more concerned about building relationships that can help longer-term survival: playing nice, smiling a lot, and avoiding the appearance of competition.
Benenson describes the conventional understanding of how sex and evolution have made women and men different—female and male animals, too. While men and women are pressured by their DNA to proliferate, they strive for these goals in different ways, making the best of their divergent strengths. Women literally bear all the burdens of pregnancy, childbirth, early childcare, and lifelong mothering. Men aren’t biologically necessary in quite the same way, which is why nature treats the sperm and its carriers as much more expendable. Men and women feel different pressures from their earliest days: boys can engage in warfare for the community, but women have to safeguard their own individual lives, which—to sum up a main theme of the book a bit abruptly—makes them worriers when it comes to survival of themselves and their progeny.
The different roles that nature assigned to women and men makes them physically different, and while men are the expendable, incautious ones, women aren’t built for the same recklessness. Women and girls try to safeguard their health even in their interactions with others. If men and boys love the idea of rough-and-tumble play and finding enemies to combat, women and girls don’t put their long-term health on the line by risking direct, open conflict. From the earliest ages, girls are more apt to show innate skills that help them get along with others, such as smiling more than boys, exercising politeness, and concealing their own natural tendencies to compete—with competition being a common trait of every living creature, considering how scarce resources are.
Women and girls are innately better at reading emotions and ulterior motives from others’ eyes and facial expressions than are men and boys. In comparison studies, women are less trusting of people in conversation who avoid direct eye contact, whereas men are more likely to be freaked out by the same, finding the experience uncomfortable. Women prefer to converse face-to-face, while men prefer side-by-side. If your survival drive is for the long term, and the long term relies on getting along with others, the ability to read others’ moods and motives comes in handy. So is the ability to hide your own ambitions, even from yourself.
When five- and nine-year-old girls and boys were put in similar situations of competition in small groups, the winning boys were openly proud of themselves. The small groups were told to elect one of the group to be the leader. The girls were uncomfortable with the competition, and the winning girls were the least comfortable of all. The winning boys preferred to boast. As Benenson describes it, here from a separate study:
One girl cannot be seen to be superior to another, not in plain sight at least. Because of this, girls have problems playing competitive games. This helps explain why Janet Lever [57] in her observations of 9- to 11-year-old children found that girls almost never play them. If they did play games, they did not play boys’ kinds of games. Boys’ games require directly interfering with someone else’s progress, such as hitting an individual with the ball before he reaches the base or pushing him out of the way. When girls played competitive games, they chose jump rope or hopscotch, where competition is indirect. Even so, if any girl tried too hard or bragged about doing well, the game ended.
Not surprisingly, girls’ games didn’t last long. During the year, not a single girls’ game lasted the full 25 minutes allotted to outdoor play. Most of the boys’ games did, every single day. Not only that, but when a conflict broke out between the girls, even if the game hadn’t even started yet, the girls just abandoned the game. According to Lever, girls “complained that their friends could not resolve the basic issues of choosing up sides, deciding who is to be captain, which team will start, and sometimes not even what game to play” (Lever, 1976, p. 483). When the game actually did get played, the winner was forbidden to say she won. She acted like she forgot. Meanwhile, the winning boys bragged for as many days as possible. Others have reported similar findings across the world [pp 180-181].
Play has a different meaning in the world of boys and girls, as the book explains. And childhood play, after all, is practice for adult behaviors and attitudes. While the book may not be an arresting read based on how intuitive the examples appear, it does present a wide range of behavioral tendencies that have a foundation in the research. The generalizations about female competition are perhaps the most controversial, but in the mood of politicized academic science, it is necessary to present findings in the hopes that they not become politically unspeakable. Suppressing debate is not a way to learn anything.
Good afternoon. It’s cloudy here and 87 degrees. There’s a projected high of 94 degrees at 4 pm (5 pm for you guys back east).
I appreciate that my aversion to eye contact can be backed up with scientific evidence.
Yeah, all the games my friends and I played during recess were directly competitive. The two I remember best are touch football and “Infinity Tag” (also called Zombie Tag). The playground at our elementary school was about the size of two football fields, if they were perpendicular and overlapped at the ends. So, something like this: _|
The best example I can think of, though, I’d probably me and my sister. We had this game we called “Guys” (for “guys” is what we called our characters). Basically, it was a kind of elaborate role play with our toys, action figures, Legos, etc. My Star Wars minifigures were always trying to, essentially, colonize my sister’s bedroom.
I didn’t call it that, but it’s obvious in hindsight.
Good morning! Cloudy and cool here. I am going to try to make the most of it.
I did not know that girls preferred to talk face to face and boys side by side. Perhaps this explains why I did not get along well with girls when I was little and am, in general, more comfortable with guys.
My son had another encounter with brazen retail crime yesterday: a guy put a bunch of sewing machines into a cart and then just breezed out the door without paying. He might have had an accomplice, as there was a customer attempting to buy a large number of gift cards that he had not intention of paying for, which can be distracting.
Someone did call the cops and got the tag number from the car but the employees are not allowed to do anything else, not even yell, "Stop! Thief!" Millions of years of evolutionary biology thwarted by the economics of cheap labor and fear of liability suits.
Given that the guy almost ran over an old lady with a cart, it does seem that the store has some interest in notifying customers that there is a situation so they can get out of the way if necessary.
It is galling to the employees.