What is wrong with groups of guys that form a peer group?
Nothing, if you like evolutionary biology. Lots, if you like modern standards.
Take a guy and give him a potentially high-risk, edgy task. Leave him alone or make it as routine a situation as possible. He'll evaluate the risks. He might come up with a bad answer and do something dangerous--there's a nice distribution for this behavior--but he'll evaluate the risks and that'll be the basis of his decision.
Now take a guy and give him the same potentially high-risk, edgy task. Put him in a group of buddies. He'll evaluate the risks--but one of the risks is now that if he doesn't do it he won't be seen as manly, studly; he'll lose status within the group and possibly group status entirely. Not engaging in the task will be seen as backing down. A large percentage of his calculation isn't risk/safety, but group dynamics.
Girls do the same kind of thing. But apparently (from what I've read) less of it. Part of it is because we're primates. Some may be cultural, but look at all sorts of initiation rituals cross-culturally and you see that young men are given societal brownie points, "get a good mate" points, and "get additional chances at reproductive success" points based on this kind of activity. Bad boys make bad mates, but they still tend to have a reasonable number of kids.
I don't care if you're a football player at a preppy school, a football player at a middling high school, or a poor teenager in a downtrodden area, young men form groups. Some we call "teams." Some we call "gangs." Usually we applaud risky behavior--as long as it's not *too* risky or daring in a way that we folk outside their group disapprove of.
There's also a tendency to encourage all-young-male peer groups. We send boys out to play with other boys; playing with girls is often discouraged, either by the girls' parents or the boys'. We assign boys to all-male groups. in some cases we delimit their behavior and do our best to provide chaperones and to model behavior. In some cases we don't. My Boy Scout troop was an example of that--there were approved behaviors and disapproved behaviors: intoxicants, sex, violence, three of the things involved here, were all discouraged pretty much at all times. But a lot of male groups are encouraged to meet independently, or they're encouraged to "bond"--meaning that they'll associate outside of circumstances with adult supervision. Or the supervision they get fosters a kind of risk-taking version of manhood. So the karate classes I took as a kid strongly punished any mention of using intoxicants or any hint of violence punished severely. When we mixed with kids from other karate teachers' groups, some were encouraged to be more aggressive because they were trying to get the kids to commit more strongly and in hopes of channeling that aggression towards school and work.
You even see this kind of "aggression" group dynamic at DU, where groups all but egg each other on in the boldness of their assertions and attempts to impose their authority on other groups, however risky the underlying argumentation may be. The most extreme members of each all-male group, all-female group, or even any on-line group tend to drive the debate and drive out more moderate members and above all more moderating behaviors.
Was that the "ugly beyond belief" answer you thought of, or was yours a bit more politically or (sub)culturally limited?
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