LOL! I live in the States, but I was raised to believe it's not appropriate to pick your nose or fart in front of girls/women. And there are other multi-day/week camping issues that are probably best kept between guys until there's time to clean up and return to society.
LOL I've never been worried about picking my nose or farting in front of girls. My body functions as it sees fit. Male bonding issues? What are those? Do you teach each other how to masturbate in the woods without getting a rash?
Sounds like you're making excuses to have a little super secrete boys club in the woods. Going by what Cait told me about the Girl Scouts, they do everything the boys do. At least at the camp she runs every summer they did.
As for accommodating gender differences for sleeping arrangements. I don't see how that's any more difficult than what parents have to do who have boys and girls.
Interesting fact about colours associated with boys and girls. Pink used to be a boys colour and blue used to be for girls. But no I never saw that storey. At least I don't remember it.
Why does it need to be a negative, sinister, or perverse thing?
It's definitely not a super secret boys club, nor is it perverse.
There have been Scoutmasters who've gone to jail for being pervs, but there are also MA instructors who've suffered similar fates. Not really sure where your ideas are coming from but they're off base. Google "Boy Scouts" and peruse their website if you're interested.
Come to think of it I'm not sure it made the bbc. It came out when we were doing feminist idealogy at college and discussing whether gender roles and attitudes (women are nuturing, men violent etc) are natural or forced on us as kids so naturally it got a mention.
The colour thing still seems to be the same but the impression I get from the few parents I know is that these ideas of "X is male Y is female" only concern us as mature people: I know my brother had a doll you fed and stuff as a kid which is meant to be a girls toy, we both wore colours that are typically seen as more feminine and my politics lecturer was saying his daughter loves camo and action figures.
I was a tomboy. I played with boy toys and i hated things like dolls. I thought boys were more fun than girls. And i liked sports like ice hockey. And even now I do things that are male dominated, like karate.
Most girls I knew when I was younger were into at least one thing that was meant to be masculine and almost all were contact sports or something violent like action man or power rangers or whatever. Hitting stuff is just one of the funnest things there is
As a kid I played with any toy I liked. I had baby dolls (which I frequently did crazy things like play at doing surgery on) but I loved visual/spatial toys like 'Air, Land and Sea'.
I've just had a random thought on violent toys: My parents refused to let me have a toy gun till I was something like 9 because they didn't want to promote violence. I now spend my time either choking people, shooting people in games, or shooting people dressed as soldiers with RIFs in a dark tunnel
And why does simple friendship between boys need to be any different with girls? It's a totally bollocks excuse. And which of those merit badges is gender dependent? Can't say I saw any.
They already develop these friendships outside of the Scouts. So are you saying that boys and girls should have no options for learning and developing around only boys or only girls? Remember, there are already co-ed youth learning and development options outside of schools, and they get plenty of co-ed interaction in schools all week.