Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

And I think the more play, the better.

And we are designed to play boys and girls in different ways.

And it helps us grow.

learn how to be social and have social relationships and respond physically.

And all of that is so important.

And if we're not doing that, then I think we're going to have more trouble as adults.

But where it's not so much fun and people are getting hurt, yeah, then I think the parent, I don't know, maybe you let them work that out too.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

There's this difference where boys will say to your face, you fat F. They'll insult you to your face and bully to your face.

Girls are very aggressive also, but what's interesting is that they tend not to do it in a direct confrontational way where they're exposing themselves as the perpetrator.

So they can hide from physical harm, which is more adaptive, but they can denigrate the reputation, say, of other girls, which they do because they're their competition in terms of mating competition for, say, high status girls.

So they can denigrate the appearance or behavior, especially sexual behavior.

And it's cruel.

It's extremely cruel the way that this sort of feminine aggression.

Well, we certainly see more face-to-face aggression among male mammals.

What we do see in female hierarchies sometimes is that there's harassment, say in some monkeys, there's harassment of a subordinate female by the dominant, so much so that cortisol goes up in the one who is being harassed and it interferes with her capacity to reproduce.

So that is not a physical necessarily confrontation.

It's just harassment.

But the sex difference in human aggression with females doing more of this passive aggression, I think part of that is...