Well, it was bound to happen. America has managed to export its latest pop-psyche obsession: that there’s something inherently wrong with boys.

The British Medical Journal, in a report issued two days before Christmas (who says the Brits don’t know how to be jolly?) and titled “The Fragile Male,” have declared that the human male is on most measures more vulnerable than the female. The author of the report, psychologist Sebastian Kraemer of the Tavistock Clinic in London, says it’s time we not only start being more sensitive to the male condition but also begin raising our boys to be more sensitive themselves.

Stateside, the spate of books in the past couple years on American boyhood have created their own publishing genre. The message: Boys suffer many more developmental, emotional, learning and other disorders than girls and attention should be paid.

The message, both here and in Britain, is a good one. However, the suggestion that boys’ fragility might be helped were they to deepen their emotional capacities misses the point.

Kraemer first details the biological fragility of the male fetus. At conception there are more male than female embryos. External stress around the time of conception evens out the ratio, suggesting that the male embryo is more fragile than the female. Thereafter, as Kraemer puts it, “it is downhill all the way.”

The male fetus is at greater risk of death or damage from almost all obstetric “catastrophes” that can happen before birth, including brain damage, cerebral palsy, congenital deformities of the genitalia and limbs, premature birth and stillbirth. And when he emerges from the womb — if he makes it — he is developmentally behind his sister — four to six weeks, in fact.

As a boy, the guy suffers more developmental disorders than girls — reading delay, hyperactivity, autism, stammering and Tourette’s syndrome occur three to four times more often. As a teen, he is far more likely to suffer a non-fatal or fatal accident, perpetrate a violent crime, and commit suicide.

The trend continues later in life. Circulatory disorders, diabetes, alcoholism, duodenal ulcer and lung cancer are all commoner in men. And if they do become ill, they’re less likely to see a doctor.

Kraemer rightly suggests that the more developmental problems there are, the more care is needed. He also points out that precisely because difficult babies are difficult to look after they often receive less good care. On this point he and his American counterparts are dead on the money: Boys’ problems, often because of their difficult nature, are commonly ignored.

EMOTIONAL DEFICIENCIES?

But Kraemer goes awry when he begins to explore what he obviously thinks of as boy’s inferior emotional abilities. When exposed to the stress of others — a crying infant, say — boys seem less sympathetic than girls. And studies of effects of early bereavements and separations, he says, have found that boys dismiss the experiences as of little concern.

Is their apparent lack of sensitivity just another dimension of their “genetic disorder”? That’s the implication and it fits in neatly with the raft of other evidence cited by people who believe that men’s emotional talents are vastly inferior to women’s and that, furthermore, if men could just become more like women the world would be a better place.

Different, yes. Inferior … well, let’s stick with different. CT scans show that fewer areas of the brain light up when men experience happiness, sadness and other feelings. They also have less serotonin, which is known to mediate emotions, than women. Human life probably wouldn’t have made it this far if men felt as deeply as women do. So to think of men’s emotional style as deficient and inferior misses the point: It’s simply different.

I mean, just think: Women suffer far more bouts of serious depression than men do. The case could be made that they feel too much.

Does anyone ever suggest that they model their emotional life more on the order of men’s?