Young males simply do not mature as quickly as they once did. Ages 14 to 26 are very dangerous. Filled with testosterone, very impulsive and a sense of invulnerability. Unlikely the draft or near universal military service will ever return, but that martial experience at ages 18-20, probably saved many young men. Nothing can console their parents and sadly those friends who are lighting candles probably simply feel that this could never happen to them and will go on with similar behavior. Pax domini sit semper vobiscum.
I’ve talked to my dad about his teens, and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure things have changed. Young men detach from reality and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Women are not expected to act in this manner.
Young men are trying to make their own way in life, beginning the transition from dependent to a person who makes all their own decisions. In the young man’s teens, he’s having to become ‘his own’ dominant male, as opposed to the paternal dominant male he’s moving out from under.
Young women are busy doing the equivalent in their own process moving into adulthood, but they don’t generally have to deal with a person (mom) who is as challenged by their choices, as much as fathers are by their son’s.
Women don’t generally have to show off to attract members of the opposite sex. Men generally do. At the very least, by their own perspective, men do. Popularity in their own social pool translates to young men as cool, something that will attract women to them.
This isn’t meant to infer that women don’t have to compete, but the types of things they do to appeal to men, isn’t generally as potentially physically self-destructive. Self-destructive yes, but as likely fatal, generally not.
That’s my take on it. There’s probably some things in there that others would disagree with though.