I didn’t even see a Pixie Stick during my childhood. To this day I’m not exactly certain what one is. (I have a vague mental image of something somewhere between Pocky and those little white candy cigarettes, but I’m sure that’s wrong.)
Hmmmm…let’s see.
Take mom’s Aquanet hairspray and a lighter and torch anything that remotely qualified as an insect.
Played “Trench Warfare” by throwing dirt clods at each other when there was pipe trenches dug up for new houses. Proceeded to hit my brother in the head with a typical dirt clod that harbored a rock inside of it. Rather than quitting, we decided that our motorcyle helmets would still keep the good times rolling.
Blew stuff up. Firecrackers in mailboxes, ant hills, model planes and boats, popsicle stick buildings, etc.
Launched rockets at an angle…preferably horizontal…eh, I guess no angle.
That is so cool! If I didn’t have to be the mature grown-up mum person, I would totally try to do that (not the burning myself part, though).
It’s probably because they’re hermaphrodites. The female part of them obviously thought it was a bad idea. Exclusively male gastropods would no doubt display the degree of sang-froid required to laugh in the face of osmosis and keep on going.
My own happy childhood memories include a neighbour leaving an unguarded microwave for council collection, which myself and a friend disappeared for various entertaining experiments, and the successful use of combined hazardous chemicals, obtained through gardening suppliers and school chemistry departments, that would probably be frowned upon nowadays given concerns about ‘bombs’ and ‘terrorists’ and so on.
My only regret is never finalising the goal of transforming a SNES lightscope into a shoulder operated rocket launcher. I and my friends had to make do with a nonetheless powerful potato launcher involving an industrial sink trap and darts secured onto D cell batteries.
Lessee. . .
(female here)
Climbed trees – check
Aquanet hairspray and matches – check (now THAT was fun; yes I’m a pyro, why do you ask)
Firecrackers and horizontal bottle rockets – check
Jumped from high places (haystacks, back of bleachers) – check
We had a large and long equipment building, barn thing on our farm. There were two lines of 2x6 boards in the rafters running parallel to the roof line (nothing but a 12-foot drop underneath). My foster sister and I had races on those boards - no hands allowed.
And, for the record, I probably would have joined in Least Original’s tree hanging game.
Female here. Hand me 65 peanut butter cups and prepare to be amazed!
However, I’ll admit that when my brother, my male cousin, and my crazy uncle decided to run around in the woods shooting each other with BB guns, I went to play in the house.
Tried to slide down a rope strung between two trees using an umbrella. Like on James Bond. Fell about 20 feet.
Used to take weeks to make model airplanes, then fill them with cotton wool soaked in gasoline, light them and throw them out of the window.
Made what we called “JR Bollocks” out of catkin fluff and wax, light them, then put them somewhere they’d smoke for hours and cause consternation. Best one was in a drainage trench under the church so it looked like the church was on fire.
Soaked a firework rocket in gasoline for a day, then lit it. The stick burned off faster than the fuse, the rocket went wild, went up my shirt, burned a hole in it, set fire to my hair, and exploded about a foot from my head.
What’s the old rhyme?
“The only difference between men and boys
Is the length of their dicks and the cost of their toys.”
Bottle rocket wars. When I was 10 or so, they were the rage. I hung out with a group of guys. We’d shoot off a Roman candle, then use the tube as our launcher. Hundreds of bottle rockets would fly back and forth, and if we were lucky, we’d make someone jump a foot in the air. We could never get the girls to join in. They’d go home and bitch to mom about all the fun we were having, and then hordes of angry mothers would descend upon us screaming the mantra 'YOU’LL PUT SOMEONE’S EYEEEEE OUTTTTTT!"
Good times, good times.
I’m beginning to think that kids today just don’t get to experience the good, clean (dangerous) fun we did. I have kids, so I’m happy to keep this delusion if it is one.
And maybe that’s it. I wouldn’t remotely claim that there’s a definite difference between the sexes but I do think I see general differences, whether through socialization or instinct I claim no knowledge.
This bit, for example:
Made me laugh out loud. Of course in that situation at some point those boys are going to end up throwing bricks at each others head! Who wouldn’t? Oh, a subset of the species might not, but most of the boys I know would view it as de rigeur.
[checks location] Ah, maybe my data is skewed…I used to hang out in Montreal, but I don’t know how to say “Pixie stick” in French.
Anyhoo, it’s a thin paper tube full of pure sugar. It’s lightly dyed and (supposedly) flavored. Here in 'Murica, boys and girls alike eventually try to make Kool-Aid out of 'em (it sucks), but only the males seem to come up with the idea of snorting one up, either by laying on the table and doing it like a line of coke – not that most of us knew what coke was back then – or simply jamming the tube in a nostril and upending it.
raises hand
Oh man. Where do I start?
I had no idea that hair spray was flammable, until I was experimenting one Saturday morning with it and some matches on the dining room table! I learned quickly not to do THAT again.
I convinced my best friend and my little brother to run away from home with me; We were 7, my brother was 5. All we would require was an apple and a pack of Juicy Fruit gum apparently. We “lived” in a cardboard box behind the Beer Store until about midnight when my little brother decided to answer to the calling of one of the kind strangers out looking for us. My Mum thought we were dead. She was a complete wreck when we got home. She bathed us and hugged us and kissed us for a long while after that.
We thought shooting a BB gun at the screen door of the lady behind us was fun for a few weeks, until she found out and Dad had to buy her a new screen door.
I “stole” my parent’s car on occasion and went joyriding when I was 14, 15 years old: with a cigarette hanging from my mouth.
We used to swim in a dirty pond in the middle of the train yards. I cut my foot wide open on a rusty barrel in the bottom of the pond and needed 5 stitches to close it. I still have the scar.
I decided that I needed an underground fort at one point. So I convinced my older brother and his friends to help me dig one. We dug a maybe 6’ X 10’ hole in the ground, covered it with plywood from a construction site, covered that with dirt and sod, and then made a tunnel to a “secret” entrance also covered with a plywood hatch. I LOVED that fort. We played in there for a whole summer.
I could write a book… Kids today with their video games and iPods…
Only because you’ve never met me or the girls I played with growing up. You’d have thought we were rehearsing for a cocaine addiction.
Making fun of movies, although it’s more of an adolescent thing than a childhood thing. I’ve known women who do this, and I know there were a few women writer/actors on Mystery Science Theater, but this is mostly a thing guys do. Further, while women will go along with it socially, maybe for one movie, they generally won’t do it all day - the crowds at the B-movie mock-athons I’ve attended are overwhelmingly male.
I’m a girl but my son isn’t. Last summer he and his buddies built a go cart out of stuff laying around. They took it down the huge hill leading to the beach (despite each of them being aware of about 10 neighborhood kids injured on that hill on their bikes) and, naturally, wiped out. But was that enough? No…my son was all scraped up so he went home and put a double layer of duct tape on his scrapes and went down again.
Later I got a call from him asking me to stop for ‘a lot of bandaids and maybe some gauze and tape’ on my way home.
I would never have done that as a kid. I limited it to walking across the spillway (dam?) with my big brother to get to the best fishing spot. 
You have now;) Well, sort of met.
You’re male, I take it.
Ha! Now THOSE sound like fun times!
I was actually a pretty rough-and-tumble kid. I liked wrestling with and fighting with boys, climbing and hanging from trees, launching my bike over giant construction-created hills in our area. I took regular forays into the woods, where I would kick over logs in search of slugs, frogs and salamanders.
(Actually, I’m 25, and I still kick over logs in search of slugs, frogs, and salamanders, because frogs, slugs, and salamanders hidden under logs are one of life’s great joys.)
In elementary school I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was a pretty physical little role playing game (even though they always made me be April.)
I made boys cry and bleed countless times throughout my childhood just roughhousing along with them. I was into martial arts and bow-hunting.
Now I’m not nearly so crazy or adventurous, thinking always of safety first. But until I was about 10, I was rather Amazonian in nature. And there is still a part of me that is very physically tough. I wouldn’t hesitate to throw a punch, and I’m reasonably confident I could take out a dude twice my size if I had to.