I never shrank away from little girls. I thought they were really neat. It was pretty common, though, for boys under the age of maybe 12 or 13 to shrink away from the girls as if they had "cooties", as the saying went. There was something that scared them about girls...and they covered up that fear by banding together and acting like girls were creepy or weird in some way.

There's some hilarious stuff about that in the famous comic "Calvin & Hobbes". Calvin constantly tries to play dirty tricks on his neighbour, Susie, but she usually gets the best of him.

Girls usually mature faster than boys, they tend to be more articulate, and they are better students on average. I think what's really going on with the young boys is...number one: they're afraid that the females are smarter than they are....and number two: they're insecure about their own masuculinity and the pecking order among their mates, so they shore it up by acting like idiots in front of each other and treating the girls like alien lifeforms.

Given that I was always a conscientious objector to the whole damn "man's club" bullshit business I describe above, I got along fine with the girls...but I had to put up with quite a bit of crap from the boys. Thankfully, most of us have grown up since then! There are a few who never did, of course, but I think they're all hanging out down at "Broken Road" (the local sleazy bar in my town) or else they're in jail, so I don't seem to encounter them a lot these days.