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.