By Keng Yi, Nicole (25S03S) and Peh Zhi Ning (25A01B)
“The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.”
Rebecca West
This article was written with close reference to the thoughts and experiences of a few current RI students, collected in the form of an interview. For privacy’s sake, their names have not been disclosed in this article.
For many of us, RI is a turning point. Previously sheltered in a (mostly) same-sex environment, those of us from single-sex schools are shoved into a melting pot of gender with the hope that equilibrium will re-establish itself. It’s a fresh battle for us to weather the storm of opposite-sex interaction.
Then, throughout the course of two years, we realise that “it was never that deep”, learn to put our differences aside, and emerge on the other side of our teenage cocoons somewhat normal.
At least, that’s the theory.
The reality is that the Halal gap may take far longer than two years to bridge. More than that, some may feel that rather than bringing us closer together, our time in JC serves only to polarise us more, constantly reminding us of who we are and how that affects us.
One of the more “popular” interpretations of this starts in JIP, even before our official entrance into JC, as we’re separated as if to drive home the message of inherent dichotomy. As we anticipate the unfamiliar, we draw caricatures of boys as inherently “rowdy” and “chaotic”, girls as calmer, more “normal” or “boring”. Compared to boys, girls are less likely to not do their homework, say offensive things, or engage in unruly behaviour.
Let’s address the issue directly, then: are we all that different? Do girls really mature faster than guys?
To reign supreme in ev’ry sphere / The sons of Singapore
“There’s no emotional intelligence in their actions.”
Anonymous RI Girl 1
Even beyond an RI context, aggrieved young girls everywhere are all too familiar with the offhanded phrase “girls are just more mature”. From unsatisfying resolutions to playground arguments to one-sided classroom seating arrangements, it’s a pervasive claim, especially in a schooling context.
This can be seen in the differences in interaction between the two sexes. Whether you believe “maturity” is equivalent to “sensitivity” or so-called “public awareness”, it’s a well-acknowledged phenomenon that guys tend to showcase behaviour more characteristic of immaturity, most notably making more “edgy” comments.
“I mean, I found out that one of my CCA mates, she says the “N-word”… it was really shocking to me. But I also found out that my close guy friend said the “N-word” recently and it wasn’t really that shocking.”
Anonymous RI Girl 3
One would think that with this disparity so widely acknowledged, we would know what to expect, and hence tolerate, from who we’re speaking to. We would simply anticipate “rougher” language more from guys, and less from girls.
Yet despite this seemingly universal truth, the way we speak often takes a turn in the presence of the opposite sex.
“(Do you feel like guys change what they say when they’re around girls?)
Anonymous RI Guy 1
They don’t say racist and sexist stuff.
(So when it’s just guys, then they say racist and sexist things.)
I mean, some of them, not all of them, but yeah.”
This speaks to some perceived difference in social standards: what we deem to be acceptable and what we don’t. And if you define “maturity” as some level of social and emotional development, this has clear implications for how we draw the line between opposite sexes.
Anonymous RI Girl 2: In terms of passing comments, in general, I think they’re more rough in their language.
Anonymous RI Girl 1: Yeah, their interaction style is like that.
Anonymous RI Girl 2: Okay, but why?
Anonymous RI Girl 1: Because they don’t care for each other’s feelings.
Anonymous RI Girl 2: But it’s not only [between] guys and guys. What about guys and girls? They don’t say it to us, though.
Anonymous RI Girl 2: No, because we care. They don’t.
This gives way to two main trains of thought—the first that girls are too “woke” and don’t know how to have fun, and guys have to swerve to avoid offending them. The other: guys are too crude to have deeper feelings, don’t know how to grasp the gravity of “actions have consequences”, and girls have to fight to teach them social awareness.
Regardless of which side you take, this unconscious belief then bleeds into how we choose to communicate, and especially how we see each other. If guys and girls inherently think differently, what’s stopping us from treating each other differently as well?
“We think that in order to have male friends, you need to have a more open mind because I feel like [the] majority of them, they do say these things or act this way.”
Anonymous RI Girl 3
Or, if it’s something truly unacceptable, we could take matters into our own hands and maybe try to drag each other closer on the maturity scale by force.
Reflecting back on a moment before JC truly started, when a teacher encouraged RGS girls to try their best to “influence the male population”, conflicting views arose among those there to witness it.
Some see it as an extension of our inherent divide, just part of the natural order.
“I have a brother I’m really close to… so to me, this is their natural way of behaving. It’s just who they are.It’s not our responsibility to correct them, [but] just our innate sense of [moral] justice.”
Anonymous RI Girl 2
Arguing against this, others see it as an added burden.
“But [that] shouldn’t mean that we have a responsibility. Unfortunately, there are some people who impose those expectations.”
Anonymous RI Girl 1
In any case, the general trend is clear—intentionally or not, girls should, and do, sway the male population in this way. But there’s another viewpoint as well, suggesting the teacher’s original comment might not really be that insidious.
“I think he meant it in a way where you have to be there for the guys to interact with so that the guys know how to talk to women and, like, what’s socially acceptable…
Anonymous RI Girl 3
I’m saying in a way where, if a guy is talking to a girl, then he says something, and the girl throws him a dirty look or she side eyes him, or she’s like, what the [REDACTED]?
Then the guy will know that he’s not supposed to say that and how he’s wrong.
So, the girl isn’t expending extra effort to teach him. She’s just reacting.”
This begs the question: if all this is so effortless, does it really matter? What exactly does “girls mature faster” even mean; what if we’re just nitpicking at an unimportant thread in our social fabric?
“Boys will be boys” / “Girls just wanna have fun”
Ask a girl about the first time they heard that girls were more mature than boys, and she’ll likely conjure a childhood story of praise for good behaviour, seemingly misplaced anger towards a boy “too young to know better”, or chastisement for something a member of the opposite sex might have gotten away with.
All this accompanied with mounting discomfort, but too young to put words to it, choosing instead to ignore it in a box of “just the way things are”.
The truth is that these kinds of sweeping statements, especially for something as fluid and personal as our social and emotional growth, can have damning effects on how fairly we distribute blame in our society.
Even ignoring the questionable implications of calling a developing child “mature for their age”, girls are only too familiar with the paradox of added responsibility but equal acknowledgement.
More often than not, believing that girls simply know better sooner than boys is used as justification for asking more from them. This can be tangible, in the form of chores from early childhood, usually ones boys have the privilege of ignoring. But more common is emotional labour in remembering birthdays, organising celebrations, and a greater sensitivity to social cues: roles so normalised we often forget we expect them, but expect them nonetheless.
This strange pedestal we raise girls to inevitably gives way when they fail to fit into the roles we carve out for them.
“I think, subconsciously, we all expect girls to know better. But why? Maybe it’s like, they’re more similar to us…
Anonymous RI Girl 3
It’s like, if I was in her shoes, I would know how to act. So why doesn’t she know how to act?”
This easily accumulates to a number of mental pitfalls: tangible consequences for girls, often ones that guys would not have to worry about. Setting aside what level of “wokeness” you’re willing to accept, the reality is that girls often take the harder fall for the same crime.
“Like, for example, there’s this girl in my class…and she makes, like, racist jokes… so we pretty much completely shunned her. But if a guy did that, I feel like I would be more willing to give him a second chance.”
Anonymous RI Girl 3
And if you’re a guy who feels underrepresented, fear not, for problems regarding gender equality are hardly ever one-sided. The assumption that boys are always behind on their emotional development frequently leads to their feelings being disparaged; after all, a guy would never take it personally, would never be that sensitive.
Compared to girls, they’re given more agency to be more careless with their own and others’ emotions, as if they lack that level of deeper feeling and thinking.
“Anonymous RI Girl 1: Look at the way they reacted getting their test scores back. There are people in class, like me, who score worse and really do not want to talk about it, but they still go around with their “A”s telling everyone it’s not good enough.
Towards their friends, they’re so—’yo, bro, how much [did] you get for your test?’ Let me tell it across the class to you. That’s the way they interact for some reason.
Anonymous RI Girl 2: Do you think they act that way mainly because they know that their fellow boys wouldn’t take it into heart?
Anonymous RI Girl 1: No, but the fact is there are guys who take it into heart.
(Oh, so they do care?)
Anonymous RI Girl 1: Yes? From the way they react—’my A is so bad’—they care. They do care. But the way they express it and the way they interact with other people about it shows the lack of emotional intelligence.”
And perhaps in some twisted form of equity, boys are often made the butt of the joke—a metaphorical punching bag, especially in large social settings where both sexes are present. The assumption is that they can “take it”—essentially, that they lack the same vulnerability and sensitivity of a girl.
This belief that there is no need for subtlety only adds more barriers to boys’ path towards developing social maturity. Brushing them off this way discounts their emotional depth and sense of right and wrong, as if they are unable to properly understand the weight of their words, unable to decide what exactly they want to say.
The truth is that, obviously, we are all aware of and able to comprehend the idea of consequence. Making excuses serves only to patronise and does little in the way of actual progress.
“Just because you can get away with it doesn’t mean you’re not still being an idiot.”
Anonymous RI Guy 1
Brains and Beauty Puberty
Some argue that our “inbuilt” maturation differences have a more substantial scientific explanation, often supporting it with the well-known fact is that girls undergo puberty earlier than guys, with the average age of puberty being 11 years old for girls, and 12 years old for boys.
For those of us who went to co-ed primary/secondary schools, this might ring true to you. The exact reason why girls go through puberty earlier is still unclear to us, although some theories have been made.
Presenting, some common/uncommon theories skimmed from the internet:
- Females need more time to reproduce, hence earlier puberty gives them a larger ‘window’ to have more healthy children.
- Going through puberty earlier allows females to get with older males, hence securing a male who is better equipped to support a family.
- Becoming reproductively mature takes longer for females than males, hence they have to start earlier.
- Genetically Modified Chickens/Milk/Eggs (I found this on Reddit…wouldn’t it also impact males?)
- Oestrogen from birth control diffusing into the air and attacking innocent pre-pubescent girls. (Quora is an interesting place.)
- The presence of male testosterone in the air triggers puberty in females. (I’m not even going to try.)
Regardless of the reason, whether that be for children-churning or older-guy-bagging, girls do mature faster than guys, at least physically. But does this really mean that girls are mature, in the full sense of the word? Think back to when we were 12-13, in the throes of various phases (Anime, Minecraft, Genshin, etc). Could we really be considered mature?
Again, the main argument for “girls mature faster” is to do with the wrinkly, squishy, mystery box within our skulls. That is, the brain.
However, can it really be said that female brains mature faster than male brains? As a matter of fact, some studies showcase exactly this.
A 2013 study showed that brain optimisation happens around the ages of 10-12 for girls, and 15-20 for boys. By ‘pruning’ unnecessary neural connections, people’s brains start growing, in terms of depth and speed of thought. Perhaps, if we take only this study into account, we can say that indeed, girls do mature faster than guys. However, science is rarely that straightforward.
A 2021 study conducted showed that the 50% of the world, is in the androgynous middle ground when it comes to brain development, with the remaining half split equally, 25% each in the male and female binaries. As such, it’s really impossible to categorise brains by female or male.
Nature vs Nurture
Another common explanation suggests a circular chain of events, where girls and guys develop at different rates as a result of the differing levels of responsibility placed onto them from a young age, perpetuating a cycle of cause and effect. This plays on the “nurture” side of the argument.
Just one or two years ago, the majority of us spent a good portion of our life in an environment segregated entirely by sex. In a gendered world, how could that not impact our development?
The contrasting school cultures we are pushed into and early internalisation of gender roles and stereotypes play on our perception of what it means to be a girl or a boy. They provide us with entirely different sets of experiences that raise us to be different people.
Girls are more well-behaved, guys more susceptible to acting out; girls are more suited to taking biology, guys are better off taking physics. Hear it enough times and you might even start to believe it.
This isn’t all speculation, either. A study in 2019 on the effects of sexes on brain development found that “the sex differences observed in executive function were not related to brain development, possibly suggesting that these are related to experiences and strategies rather than biological development.”
In other words, the disparity in cognitive ability to control our behaviour between sexes is attributed more to our environment and experiences, rather than an inherent biological difference.
Boy or Girl? (A Child.)
While there are differences between the sexes when it comes to puberty and physical maturity, it it really justifiable to place greater responsibility and expectation upon girls, simply because they have two X chromosomes? In the same vein, can we truly expect boys to be less emotionally sensitive, to brush off hurt easily because they have an X and Y chromosome?
Everyone develops at their own rate. Whether boy or girl, the numbers aren’t able to fully capture the uniqueness of every person. Sure, the average age for puberty is 11 for girls. But some go through puberty as early as 7, others as late as 16. The same goes for boys.
In the end, putting hormones and chromosomes and genomes aside, we are all still RI students struggling through JC; still uniquely human.