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In real life, human behavior is ambiguous, human motivations are muddled or cloaked. It takes decades to figure out what those closest to us are up to. Add to that the mysteries of a different gender, and...

Take a recent commercial: Three guys are sitting around the living room, competing to see who can stuff the largest number of party noisemakers - the kind that unfurl when you blow through them - into their mouths and up their nostrils. Their sweethearts/wives appear at the door and glance at each other with that look that says: "Don't they ever grow up?" Then the women go and get a board game. In the last scene everybody is sitting peacefully around a table, playing Pictionary or something like that.

The tag line: Men - Never leave them to their own devices!"

We laugh, but isn't it with the laugh of recognition? In 30 seconds, television has laid bare one of the deepest mysteries of human behavior: Inside the typical male lives an adolescent boy ready to goof off at a moments notice, just as even the youngest of girls already yearns to take on adult responsibilities. Such as getting men to act their age.

It's a common observation, says Dr. Gilda Carle, a Yonkers, N.Y., psychotherapist who writes books for women trying to figure out men (Don't Bet on the Prince! Have to Have the Man You Want by Betting on Yourself).

In a typical relationship, she says, "He wants to go skydiving, she doesn't want him to go skydiving. He wants to go out with his friends once a month, she doesn't want him to do that."

Sure, there are women who want to skydrive or hang out with the gang, says Dr. Carle. "But women are the relationship police," she says. "Women think they have the change 'em gene."

That gene ensures that men can be boys "because they always know that their women will take care of things." In the commercial, after all, it's the women who get everybody to sit around the table and play nice.

As you might guess, the television campaign, which is sponsored by Hasbro Games, is aimed at women, who, says Hasbro spokesman Mark Morris, make most of the game buying decisions around the house.

Of course. Board games bring people together under controlled circumstances for non-rowdy play. (I know of at least one set of parents who named their little boy Rowdy, by the way. Can you think of anyone who ever named a little girl Rowdy?)

Left to their own devices, here's how the little boys that lurk inside grown men would pass the time: They would jiggle one of those wobbly headed hula-dancing figurines on their bellies, or they would dump catnip on a napping friend just to see what the cat will do - to cite two ads from the same Hasbro campaign.

Here are a few other enlightening moments from recent TV ads: The proud owner of a hot new car - male, of course - dashes off to run an errand at hte least hint from his wife, who is left standing at home, arms folded, wondering where he's gone off to this time.

In another, a guy stands in Circuit City, bonkers over a football game on a wide-screen TV set. His wife walks up and the salesman smoothly shifts into a discussion of all the excellant educational programming available on the set. Satisfied that her husband is on track, the woman walks off to resume shopping.

Dr. Steve Craig, who teaches the history and law of mass media at the University of North Texas at Denton, calls such commercials "poor dumb men ads."

Dr. Craig, who has written papers about gender roles in television commercials, notes that a couple of decades ago as agencies wer catching flak for TV commercials that portrayed women as helpless or ditzy or mindless sex objects.

A commercial requires a 30-second dramatic or comedic plot that everybody can understand, Dr. Craig says. As more women began taking daytime jobs, he says, they became an important component of the evening, prime-time audience.

"If you're and advertiser, you wonder what you can do that will target women, give them a snicker or two."

Poor dumb men ads, that's what, ads that confirm women's suspicions that they are forever taking charge of men, forever cleaning up after them.

To be fair, Dr. Craig says, the female counterpart of the poor dumb man has not disappeared from television; you'll see her in car and beer ads, often wearing a bikini and gazing longingly as some guy drives by. Typically, these ads run during sporting events, he says. "Because watching sports is the ultimate male fantasy trip." (More about sports in a moment.)

They trade on stereotypes, he concedes. "But every stereotype is based on a truth. It wouldn't work if it wasn't."

Gender stereotypes are particularly recognizable when they are seen in a specific context, says Dr. Leslie Brody, associate professor of psychology at Boston University. She notes thet the Hasbro commercial depicts men in groups.

"Research shows there are differences when people are with their own gender," she says. "Their behavior reinforces each other."

If the commercial showed a group of women sitting around putting on makeup, they might look equally adolescent."

Perhaps, but not like adolescent boys. That's because boys behave differently from girls.

"There are data that show that from a very early age boys are more active than girls," Dr. Brody says.

"They tend to internalize prohibitions less easily than girls. This may be partially genetically rooted. Then you combine this with cultural stereotypes that may encourage boys to be active and take risks, and that reinforce girls to be shyer, more inhibited, and you probaly do wind up with men being more risk-taking than women."

Call it MHS - Male Horseplay Syndrome. "Parents treat their sons and daughters differently," says Dr. Carle, the Yonkers psychotherapist. "In a class I teach, there was one young man, a young father, who said his son was throwing sand in the play box and his wife didn't say a word. But when she saw their daughter doing the same thing, she said, 'Don't do that, that's not nice.'"

"We do this to our children even without recognizing it."

Watch two children, a boy and a girl, climbing a tree, says Dr. Deborah J. Swiss, educator and author of The MAle Mind at Work: A Woman's Guide to Working With Men (Perseus; $16). "Often you'll see the boy go higher. Someone will be telling the girl, 'Don't fall or you'll get your dress dirty.'"

So parents are more likely to encourage - or at least permit - little boys to roughhouse, and more likely to restrain little girls, to emphasize manners and deportment.

This is where those women in the Hasbro ad fit into the picture, says Dr. Gail M. Gross, Houston expert on child development and behavior.

"Our culture since the 1960s and 70s has really developed a female model for the male. We want them to be emotional. We're not teaching them to deal with the aggressive tendencies that come from testosterone."

"We have media showing boys in a whole new way. But boys are still boys. We can't ask boys to act more like girls."

Tribal and agricultural societies do a much beter job of coping with excess male energy and horseplay, she says.

"In more agarian times we had places for that agression. We mentored these boys, they were attached to their fathers into their teens. there was a need for that agression. There were rituals that prepared a boy - they're more action oriented - prepared them for the next stage of life."

Instead we have sports.

One of the reasons sports remains popular long past adolescence, she says, is that males have been poorly prepared for midlife. Instead, we have the guy who spends the rest of his life reliving the days when he was a high school football hero.

Or, the guy in the Circuit City commercial, glued to the football game on the wide-screen television.

Watching an 8-year-old boy head to a baseball field full of other boys got Deborah Swiss speculating: How would that same boy fare years later in a business suit?

Pretty well, she concludes in her book The Male Mind at Work.

"The male code relies on swagger, bravado, the mask of invulnerability, emotional distance. These are the survival tools that serve them as adolescents. And it serves them well in many workplaces," she says. "I call it gamesMANship."

"Two men can be in a meeting, pounding on the table and calling each other SOBs. Then they'll walk out the door and say to each other, 'Say, how about a game of golf?'"

"And women will wonder, 'What was THAT about?'"

As usual, all the experts say, the answer is for each gender to learn something from the other. Men can pick up on the emotional intelligence of women, for example. They can tame their competitive instincts, cultivate grace in defeat, learn to really listen to women.

And women can avoid being stuck in the caretaker role while the men go out and land the big deals, win the big games. They can learn not to take disagreement personally. They can learn emotional distance.

And even if they don't care to learn how many party noisemakers can be stuffed up a nostril, perhaps they might learn to put up with those who do.