I was in the park the other day, watching my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Zoe and the neighbor’s five-year-old son playing around the slide and the climbing equipment.
“You wanna play pirates?” he demanded, and she went along with him.
It was yet another variation on the good-guys-bad-guys games that he and the little boys in her daycare group play all the time. Girls seem to be less interested in this. Zoe started collecting maple seeds and brought a handful over to me: these, she said, were my fare. I could use it to go on the boat.
He, meanwhile, was into his pirates, firing off sound effects and yelling a running commentary. He was constantly beset, it seemed, by enemies and frustrations: the rudder had jammed and had to be wrenched free, the ship was trapped, the pirates were swarming aboard.
It’s been suggested that these war games are stylized ways of acting out the largely uncomprehended tensions and dramas of everyday life; but if this is true, why do boys play them more avidly than girls? The social science answer is that this is how boys learn and pass on the aggressive roles that their culture demands of them; but this game seemed just too solitary and too intense for that.
Watching the tiny playground drama, I remembered something a psychologist told me: that boys are born more irritable than girls, more easily upset, more restless, harder to please. It’s not clear why.
One theory is that their nervous systems are not fully developed at birth. Another is that boys must for some reason struggle to separate themselves from their mothers, while girls identify with them.
A third is that the default gender, as it were, is the female gender and it takes an extra chromosome and the addition of a hefty dose of androgens to make a male. The boy baby, then, is still struggling with these profound changes even as he is being born, and for months, even years afterwards. It stands to reason that there’s some built-in slight antagonism between the boy’s body and its hormonal additives, that boys are born in conflict with their own biochemistry.
As I watched this little captain besieged by the invisible forces threatening to overwhelm him, I couldn’t help thinking of him trying to fight off the unquiet elements that were his birthright, a constant barrage of physical impulses and mood twitches he could neither control nor understand. All he could do was to objectify the struggle in the time-honored way, as a never-ending imaginary battle that he had to wage against enemies he could understand, or at least visualize: pirates, monsters, bad guys. So much simpler than self versus anti-self.
Zoe trotted over to me with some more seeds and he turned to scream at her over his shoulder, furious that she had abandoned her post in his dream of self-defense. Then he snatched up the impressively complex gun he has made out of Lego and fired off round after round towards the tennis courts.
Irritable, restless, hard to please: who knows what these mean for the fate of nations, high technology, piracy on the high seas?
1990 Morning Edition, I expect.
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3 users responded in this post
1. Being a girl who used to play ‘guy’s games’, I can’t agree with this one 🙂
3 – having 2 boys, I see the same contrast all the time. Of course there are exceptions. One boy had a close girlfriend in grades 1-2 and they would just walk around the playground talking. You’d think it was him acting ‘like a girl’, except that she was very much a tomboy. My other boy has a female friend that likes those boy games, too, but that is not typical. The boys are playing war from the get go, despite politically correct parents avoiding all war and combat-themed toys, stories, and videos in early life. The girls, not so much.
I like how you present several lines of speculation without picking any single answer, as I don’t believe we (science) has answered the question. It would be a good idea to address the fact that there are girls who like combat games. I think the last sentence is the weakest in the essay, a bit predictable. Dive deeper.
“3” in that I learned new things about young males, so I appreciate having not just having an enjoyable read but getting interesting information as well. However, “2” in that I think it’s good for an alternate but it’s not quite there for the 1st cut.
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