Why do men mature slower than women?

Are you already questioning the premiss of this post? Yeah, well, that makes two of us, actually. Just a warning up front: this post is going to be full of my unresolved ruminations.

So, I'm sure you've all heard that familiar commentary that men mature slower than women do. Basically, this is meant to explain man-child syndrome, viz. the 30 year old guy who can still commiserate with 12 year olds, since they both play the same video games.

One question: is this man-child thing meant to be limited to Western Society men, or does it apply also to guys in Japan and Morocco too?

Okay, so here's my up front objection to the commentary: it seems to me that the unspoken premiss of the idea that men mature slower than women is a completely normative, value-laden judgement call about what men and women SHOULD be doing at certain ages.* What I think this judgement call amounts to is some kind of condensed version of the same formulaic, teleological notion of romantic love that gets shoved down our throats in countless, myriad ways every day.

Am I even approximately right here? It just seems to me that maturation in this context is equated with things like "not philandering", "settling down", "getting serious", etc. Generally, not acting like a boy who has his whole life ahead of him, but rather like a man who's knee-deep in life, and needs to start making serious decisions about where to go from here.

But if that's true, then what "men mature slower than women do" comes down to is just a failure to recognise the fact that men and women have divergent reproductive goals. As I've discussed before, monogamy is a reproductive STRATEGY that originates from the phaenomenon of female sexual choice; men participate in it because in certain circumstances it can also be our best reproductive strategy. But sometimes, it's not our best reproductive strategy, in which case, "don't philander" or "settle down" is, from the perspective of evolution, actually bad advice.

Anyway, that "men mature slower" is just a pro-monogamy value judgement is just my suspicion. It does not, however, explain some man-child behaviour, such as indecisiveness, weakness/convictionlessness, and incomprehension of terms like "attraction" and "chemistry". You all know this guy: he's maybe in his thirties, very flaky and equivocal when it comes to his commitments, passive-aggressive, probably plays video games, has no direction in his life, hasn't had much success with women, and always says things like "I don't care what we do; what do YOU want to do".

Here's a theory I've been playing with in my head. So, imagine the polar opposite of this guy is the ultra-alpha male type. His outward displays of genetic fitness are so blatant that they're basically nauseating. He drives a benz, wears flashy clothing, talks louder than anybody else, fights or threatens other men often, and basically takes what he wants when it comes to women, whatever way he can get it. Now imagine if EVERY guy were like this. That's a very ugly picture, replete with misogyny and sexual objectification of women, rape and sexual exploitation of women, jealousy killings of rivals and mates, brutal male infighting, etc. This means that society has a great interest in discouraging those rough edges of male sexuality by promoting opposite social values, such as humility, self-restraint, and chivalry.

But what if society went too far, to the point that male characteristics were too often and too consistently discouraged? If that happened, would men grow up unequipped to enter the adult world as a full-grown adult in body body and mind?

Moreover, if this is not a problem limited to my generation, then the male figures in my life as a child probably weren't able to teach me how to grow up into a mature man, since they didn't ever lean that themselves? And even further, if there were no strong male figures in my life, how could my mother really be expected to teach me how to grow up into a mature man?

Like I said, these are just ruminations. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

*As a parenthetical side-note, I should point out that I'm an emotivist on questions of normativity, which means that I believe all "should" statements are just expressions of a point of view. So, "you should refrain from killing babies for fun" really just expresses the idea that society has an interest in curtailing that behaviour, not some kind of objective morality that transcends human activity.