It isn't even true that it's all to do with brains and bodies and chemicals. Sure there are underlying sex differences, but the best boy at anything is a lot b

It isn't even true that it's all to do with brains and bodies and chemicals. Sure there are underlying sex differences, but the best boy at anything is a lot better than the average girl, in the same way the best girl at anything is a lot better than the average boy. Where athletic championships are concerned the differences in the distributions make a difference, but to organize a society around the tails of the distribution is a mistake. Men are shaped by social expectations as much as anything else, and those expectations are communicated to them violently and in no uncertain terms. To be a successful man you must over-produce so you can take care of your family. You must defend something: your family honour, your country, your personal integrity. And you must do so violently, or you aren't a good man. These characteristics are pretty much universal, but once upon a time kingship was pretty much a universal characteristic of human societies, and we don't see too many of them around any more. Kingship was also considered "natural" and "inevitable" at the time when it was merely common. So I'd be wary of arguments that simply because beating the hell out of boys and men until they are shaped into a particular mold is common, that it reflects more than relatively weak proclivities on the part of the people being beaten. Until we recognize that boy's poor performance in school is due to masculinity being socially constructed in ways that fail boys and men academically, we will continue to perpetuate this systemic injustice, and we won't really know what boys and men are capable of.