I believe that men and women are wired completely differently in some regards, and the older I get the more I am convinced of it.
One major difference I see is in how they relate to their friends. Many men bond with other men by trading insults. The deeper the bond, the meaner they can talk about the other’s mother.
Women, OTOH, will go WAY out of their way to avoid insulting their friends. They are much more sensitive to other people’s feelings than men. They bond by being nice and sharing feelings and experiences.
And yes, before someone so kindly comes along to point it out to me, I know that this is a generalization and not everyone in a group shares the same characteristics and I’m not trying to stereotype. I find it quite clear, though, that the majority of men share certain characteristics, and women tend to share certain traits with other women. I say majority, not all.
I see a major difference in the choosing of friends, by men. I know I’ll sound like Sally, from ‘When Harry met Sally’, but I don’t think a man can be just friends with a woman. Unless one of them is gay.
But I guess I’m generalising too. 
I am a guy and I tear into some of my best friends like they are my mortal enemies. Most of them are women though and I’ve never dated a single one of them.
Anyway, I’d say the biggest difference is that we have penises and you don’t.
Everything else is just a generalization.
I was having this conversation with one of my best friends last night, who is a man, and I’m a woman. I had been seeing his little putdowns as passive-agressive behavior. He would say something jokingly, and it would hurt my feelings sometimes, and then when I called him on it, he’d say, “I was just kidding.” I joke around all the time, yet I do get hurt feelings when the joke is an insult towards me.
I honestly think that men don’t perceive mess in the same way that women do. And I don’t think it is necessarily a result of social conditioning either.
You ask a bloke to clean up his room, and he will almost invariably retort, “Why? It looks clean to me”, even though there is a weeks worth of skanky washing and/or miscellaneous crud strewn around the floor and every other flat surface.
I have to wonder, though, how much of this stuff is due to society and how much is hard-wired into us?
My guess would be it’s more societal, but I guess the way to tell would be to look at other cultures and see if the same trends appear.
hehehehe, Aesiron 
More differences: Older men hate wearing reading glasses. They’d rather order a martini in a milkbar, than put on the things and read the menu.
Men never admit being lost.
and on the same subject: Ask a room full of men what’s the fastest way to go from Oak street to Elm road and you’ll have enough conversation for a month.
Little boy approaches his busy mom and says he need to ask a question. She says, “I’m busy honey, go ask your father.” The little boy says “I don’t want to know *that much * about it.”
I second this. My wife has a much higher tolerance for clutter than I do. I’m of the “everything in its place” school, even if “place” is a neat stack. She leaves assorted stuff strewn about on just about any available horizontal surface. For example, our refrigerator is often a precarious food pyramid; the bag o’ carrots on the tin of chocolate that is balanced across the milk containers. Or the freezer…it’s like she’s playing tetris. On the other hand, she has a much lower tolerance for dirt and the like. For instance, she vacuums much more often than I would.
A physical difference that I wonder about - she bruises incredibly easy. Bump her shin on a table - a spot wells up next day and stays for a week or so. I don’t think I’ve had a black & blue since I was a teenager (and given some of the stupid stuff I do, I deserve bruises at a minimum). In general, do women naturally bruise more easily?
[QUOTE=Digital Stimulus]
I second this. My wife has a much higher tolerance for clutter than I do. I’m of the “everything in its place” school, even if “place” is a neat stack. She leaves assorted stuff strewn about on just about any available horizontal surface…QUOTE]
Oh, orright then, there’s always ONE exception to the rule.
Would that be me? Or my wife? Just wondering which one of us is exception-al.
ducks
If you are invited to a married couple’s home for dinner and find the meat course especially good, ask the man where the meat came from. He will say "Bill the Butcher"or wherever. Ask the woman the same thing and she will say “Why, what’s wrong with it?” And there you have it.
Huh! The older I get, the more I’m convinced men and women aren’t very different at all, aside from the obvious merely physical differences.
Most of the “differences” people list are idiotic generalizations; in terms of the actual people I know, they don’t match those generalizations more often than they match them.
It also seems like recent stuff I’ve read dealing with DNA and genetics and so on corroborates my point. Anyone have a link?
Although this raises the question as to what extent physical differences are manifested in behavior. I think there’s an inappropriate weight given by the word merely. Surely, there’s no arguing with the fact that, in general, men have different hormones (or at least levels of hormones). Surely, there’s no arguing that hormones affect behavior.
Now, before I take some heat for saying that, I’m not saying that these differences are enough to consistently result in the established sterotypes. I don’t have any non-anecdotal or non-“conventional wisdom” evidence one way or the other. Granted, with the distribution of possibilities, it’s only natural that some percentage of people would not fit them, hence the prevalence of anecdotal “I know plenty of men/women who don’t exhibit those differences.” The question is how large (or small) that percentage is, resulting in the use of the term generalization.
To quote Jack Kerouac from Big Sur: Cliches are truisms, and all truisms are true. While overstated (in the extreme), logically false, and not politically correct, there’s some grain of truth there. And personally, I’d be rather disheartened if there were no general differences between men and women; as a (possibly) “typical” male, I thank goodness that my wife is a (possibly) “typical” female, with all the differences that implies.
Well I have a theory about this. One way men and women are demostrably wired different is women have bigger corpus callosum then men. That being the wiring that connects the right brain to the left brain. Seem to me that would have an effect on the way the brain work. Women’s brains “talk” to each other more. Perhaps this has something to do with men’s abiltiy to compartmentaize and women’s…err…whatever the oposite of compartmentalizing is…
I love trading insults with my guy AND girl friends, but then I have very unconventional friends. I only do it to people I know really well, because a lot of people of both sexes will get offended by it. I always used to make fun of/tease my boyfriend when we were dating and now I will still greet him with “What’s up, bitch!?” and he will respond with “Nothing, ho!” I told him for Christmas I was getting him a pair of panties that said “Open 24/7” on them and he thought it was hilarious. If he had done the same for me, I would’ve died laughing.
As for the clutter part, I generate more clutter, but I couldn’t stand things actually being dirty. He wouldn’t mind them being dirty, but if they were messy, he would nearly flip.
Ooh, I do this too and have often wondered if it was just due to my fair skin or what. I can’t think of a reason for why women would bruise more than men though, unless it had something to do with hormone levels or less muscle.
I would love to study all cultures and come up with set things that men do in all cultures. I’ve read about cultures were men were the ones who cared more about their physical appearance and ones were women were considered to have bigger sex drives. There is a lot of stuff which we just assume that is ‘natural’ which really isn’t.
I’ve tried to think of every guy I’ve ever known well, including family, and I have to say that none of them insult each other’s mothers. Ever. Nor do they insult each other.
To be honest, aside from teenagers I’ve never seen any guys ‘bonding’ with insults. /shrug.
[QUOTE=kambuckta]
Make it two. My wife is very tolerant of mess.
As a fellow sufferer of HSD (Horizontal Surface Dysfunction) I’m on your wife’s side, so there. 
And I’m going to generalize whether or not anyone likes it: men don’t have the same sense of time and space that women do. A few minutes to a male is, at maximum, three 60-second minutes. A mile to a man is 5280 feet. Women estimate (and according to my husband, are usually way off.) I also think that if a man’s occupation doesn’t specifically require color expertise, they don’t get color at all. Ask a man the color of a wall and he’ll say “red” whereas a woman will say “raspberry.”
Hey! Men also recognize “light red” “dark red” “kinda pinkish” and “ugly”.