Brotherhood > Sisterhood

Last night Joyce and I had the good ol' lengthy gender conversation and she said that she feels that sometimes brotherhood trashes sisterhood, i.e. friendships between guys are stronger than friendships between girls.

Consider some of the basic goals of girls and guys. Guys innately wish to compete with each other, and if they could, blast the heads off one another. So boys grow up playing with toy cars and guns and running around trying to kick balls better than their other dude friends can. Girls innately wish to establish peace among their kind, so they develop linguistic skills better and faster and play with dolls and the like; stuff of nurturing nature, so as to ensure social stability.

As a result, girls have better interpersonal skills than guys, and tend to form friendships more easily than guys do. This entails that girls end up becoming more patronising so as to preserve the social status quo.

So, with figures strictly for example with no scientific basis whatsoever, for maybe every 20 within-gender friendships that the average girl forms, the average guy has formed only 1 friendship. This can only mean that female friendships tend to be diluted across the vast number of friendships they have as compared to male friendships.

Furthermore, male friendships are borne beyond the need to kill each other. This means that the friendship is dusted, tried and tested. It is more than just a brotherhood; it is an alliance of sorts.

It is no surprise then when they say that girls generally end up doing a lot more backstabbing, since guys separate the 'mere friends' from the 'true friends' by stabbing each other on the front. A lot of female friendships are preserved for the sake of preserving them by my very narrow-minded view of them being patronising, paying lip service and leaving insincere "let's meet up soon!" messages to even the most remote of acquaintances just so as to appear friendly and civil.

Hence sometimes, when you exclude the few true female friendships among the weeds of many insignificantly smaller female friendships that a girl may have, there is nothing really special about her trying to preserve a friendship bond since it is, technically speaking, an instinctive priority to do so. Whereas when a guy does attempt to preserve a male friendship bond, it is often of extra care, effort, practicality or sincerity since it is not something he does naturally.

So the friendships that emerge among guys are more often truly friendships while the friendships that emerge among girls are more often just to fulfil a basic social desire to make less enemies. But the thing is that I don't blame girls for being this way - girls are just naturally social creatures.

I do not doubt that there are strong friendships among girls in sisterhoods too. But overall it really just seems that there's a general dilution among female friendships as compared to the few male friendships that guys may develop.



[Edit]
The rebuttal to this post is briefly outlined here.




There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she was born, and the day she finds out why.
- Elaine Cannon

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