The art of love: Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas: 'Young Spartans Exercising', c.1860 National Gallery, London

Men may be from Mars and all that. But aside from toilet doors, the main signs of actual sexual segregation in our culture are those old gateways to Victorian schoolyards, where you can read carved in stone: BOYS, GIRLS. It's in childhood the sexes still most firmly separate themselves. It's childhood that Degas took as the setting for his most dramatic staging of sexual difference.

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But childhood in ancient Sparta. Degas tries here to imagine an education system and a society bracingly remote from 19th-century Europe (where among the gentry only boys went to school at all). Here children, regardless of sex, are raised to be physically tough, and girls are not primped and eroticised at the earliest opportunity.

Two sides, two teams: girls on the left, boys on the right. The scene is overtly divided, open competition in an open field, with the players all naked or half naked. In art, we've got so good at spotting sexuality where you might not expect it, it may be hard to see none where you might. But that surely is the thrust of this picture. In ancient Sparta, bare girls confront bare boys, with jeers, defiance, abuse, challenges – and they don't fancy each other really. This is hostility. Female and male: two tribes go to war.