Wow, how incredibly simplistic and wrong-headed. You're discounting politics, which has been an all-male or male-dominated arena for millennia and which thrives on emotional manipulation.

The idea that women are mostly feelers and men are mostly doers writes off both men and women as useless stereotypes.

Context: We're talking about teenagers. Yes, teenage boys have politics, and emotional cruelty. Still, on average, teenage boys are more physically aggressive and less emotionally manipulative than teenage girls.

Fun fact: the physical aggression comes after the emotional manipulation. The difference isn't that boys are more physical; it's that they don't hide the results.

I don't think it is correct to speak in such absolutes. Sometimes a fight is just a fight.

I got into my fair share of trouble when I was a kid; both starting fights without any real provocation and being the recipient of aggression without any real provocation. Much of the time it was caused by an unnecessary escalation of previously fun 'play' violence (towel fights in the locker room was a biggie).

I can only think of two fights that were prompted by some form of emotional argument or dispute: In middle school I fought a bully at my bus-stop, and a year or two later a kid I had been bullying in boy scouts nearly broke my nose.

> some form of emotional argument or dispute

I think you're unnecessarily narrowing the definition of "emotional manipulation".

I also do not know what "real provocation" is and how it differs from "not-real provocation".

I am disputing that "the physical aggression comes after the emotional manipulation" is always the case. Sometimes it is provoked by little more than a snapped towel (good fun) accidentally hitting somebody's balls (not good fun, and likely to start a fight). Fights that break out during or after contact sports are another obvious example, unless you are defining "emotional manipulation" in such a way that you can say that hockey players tend to do it non-verbally while on the ice... Consider also a snowball fight that involves increasingly hard chunks of snow or ice which eventually escalates to grappling in a snowbank.

"Real provocation" in my above comment would be the sort of "emotional manipulation" that you are talking about.

Again, your field is too narrow. Widen the context. You're trying to pitch fights as spontaneous events between people whose relationships are completely unspecified.

Conveniently, this makes it impossible to map out any potential emotional manipulation. It's like saying that World War I happened with no real provocation; it was just these random nations snapping towels at each other and somebody got hit in the balls, boo hoo.

Tell me who these hypothetical people are, who flip a switch and kick their neighbor's ass for no reason. Tell me how many months older they are. What competitions did they win recently? What's their relationship to the teachers? How long have they known each other? Why are some of them friends, and others merely classmates? What do they look like, to each other? What are their parents' relationships? What clubs did they join? And so on and so on.

Do you mean a minority of alpha males and females? The environment and economics have changed, which might mean metrosexuals, beta males, and other groups have become desirable by some segments of society.

In order for someone to be a "beta male", it implies they are being competitive, too. They are just less successful than the "alpha males".

"Metrosexual" is just a more PC way of calling men who care a lot (relatively) about their appearance/grooming gay. The term has supposedly nothing to do with sexual orientation, yet the term is ostensibly about it since it has "sexual" as a suffix. (And I don't really see how so-called metrosexuals can't be competitive.)

In short a lot of this comes down to the distinctions between sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Over the past two decades attitudes have shifted to where most people can clearly distinguish sexual orientation from sex and gender, but society still has a way to go in figuring out how gender differs from biological sex. The distinction between these two does not affect the majority of individuals, however, which is probably why most people do not care to distinguish the two.

I don't think that being a so-called metrosexual has anything to do with gender identity. There are probably a lot of metrosexual men that don't self-identify with femininity any more than the average man.

As far as divorcing biological sex and gender - well a lot of guys insult each other by calling each other women for whatever reason. There is no allusions to being gay, and apparently a man can be a "woman" even though his sex is a man. But somehow this doesn't seem very constructive or inclusive.

I didn't mean to imply that the term metrosexual is strictly related to gender. I know that terms like this, as well as behavior about calling someone by the opposite sex or gender as an insult are things that differ a lot by culture and circumstance. I personally don't like it; in high school I was once (or more? I can't remember) labeled a "bitch" as an insult (incidentally I am male sex but prefer to identify as neutrois or genderqueer as my gender identity).

My point is that precisely because society tends to use these terms as insults, and because there is no approach common to society, we have a lot of work to go in revising our approach to views of gender identity, sexuality, masculinity, and femininity in society.

Everyone down voting you is most likely a guy.

Not that I agree or disagree with your statement, it's almost impossible for someone of the opposite gender to fully understand the extreme differences between genders in high school.

Edit: And everyone down voting me is also a guy.

I've heard stories from girls that went way beyond what I experienced as a guy in school. But I wouldn't extrapolate those stories too far. Just keep in mind that some people (boys or girls) might have gone through way more than you did.