Collaboration and competition over shared interests—in a deeper than casual way, where it's a real passion—is how men connect amongst themselves. It's how they demonstrate their talents and inner particularities to one another. I don't know if that's really how women are meant to interface with men.
Male Fraternal Praxeological Attraction:
Men are very outwardly-oriented creatures. They tend not to really make the intuitive connection between the outward world and their inward world. They don't think about the link between the aesthetic of what they're pursuing, and the isomorphic corresponding potency within themselves that allows and motivates them to engage and succeed in that pursuit. They don't understand that the things they love are a holographic projection of themselves, and that a woman might prefer the source over the projection.
This is why poets all come off as at least a little gay—their job is to connect those dots. Men love each other fraternally for the same reason that women love men romantically—the difference is that men see it as "Oh, cool. This guy gets it." The man always conceptualizes it as a mutual interest in a third thing that's located out in the macrocosm, rather than in something within the microcosm of the other guy. At most, such as in a mentorship relationship, it's something that comes through the other guy from the macrocosm. Masculine intercommunion is praxeological rather than physical.
The emotions might even be many of the same ones as in a romantic relationship, but they're never understood, mentally categorized, or expressed in that way. The medium of the interaction is always the outer world.
The only exception is religious worship of a figure taken to be the source of the macrocosm, who Himself is understood to project the universe into being in the same kind of holographic fashion. Ordinary hero-worship doesn't even count, as the fantasy there is usually to play the big game with the guy—religious worship, on the other hand, involves a direct personal communion of the deity (the microcosm-as-source-of-macrocosm). In many religions, such as Christianity, this is even a physical (although non-sexual in this case) communion as well as a spiritual one.
Applications for Women:
While not impossible, there are a lot of difficulties women obviously would run into with the praxeological mode of interfacing with men. The first one is that it's very difficult for women to compete with men in many areas—most especially those that are physical. Women might also have trouble—even if they're otherwise very intelligent—with locking into that pure sportsmanship "autism mindset" that men get into when they compete or collaborate. This is a necessary precondition for pure focus on the external pursuit: you can't let natural embeddedness in your social context get in the way of the goal. It's also, in many men's minds, the purest expression of "himself": a faceless amalgam of talents in their fullest mode of exercise.
This is why nobody likes playing board games with "the girlfriend". She could be twice as good at the game as everyone else, but can't leave her social embeddedness off of the board. The boyfriend goes easy on her, she responds poorly to being ganged up on, and the pursuit of the "perfect game" goes on a rain-check until she's gone. Are all women like this? Of course not—but practically no men are. Autism is the opposite problem, where men have trouble embedding their minds in the social fabric even when it'd be appropriate. They're stuck in game-mode (and can wind up spending days writing long screeds such as this one on forums).
It's obviously not totally impossible for women to do it too, though, and women are blessed to be able to have both the physical and praxeological modes of interface as options. For men, it's really just the praxeological mode plus a bunch of hideous and self-destructive non-options—in fact, the "options" are so bad that the people who go for them are often ones that due to some weakness or personality defect are unable to participate in the praxeological mode.
