It was a rigidly hierarchical structure, with power concentrated in ascending ranks of superiority, from the enslaved farming majority of the Messenians, to the semi-free Laconians recruited as auxiliaries, to the despised Spartans who did not make through the agoge or lost their status because of poverty, lack of enthusiasm for wars, normal instincts. Up to the ruling class - the Spartiates - who lived in military camps even in town, and passed the day in the gym cultivating their physique, training in martial arts and seducing young boys. There are people like that even today in our society, they are called gays.
Spartiates were uninterested in women, who - uniquely in Classic Greece - were left unattended to live as they wished, including extra-domestic sex life, owning and managing property (half of the land was owned by women), and so. Sparta may be described as a women's society, the men being more interested in exclusive male pursuits, I mean, homosexual pursuits, like showing off their lean, muscular, attractive body, dressing their long hair in braids, arranging their long red military capes, and of course, chasing and seducing ephebes.
The number of military age Spartiates could not be stabilized, so this military society lived in permanent demographic anxiety, yet it was incapable to overcome xenophobia and absorb foreigners, so they made up by drafting subject Laconians. By the time of the Battle of Leucra, there were only 700 of them assisted by tens of thousand of unenthusiastic allied troops that evaporated as soon as they noticed that the crack Spartan battalion was retreating in face of maybe 50,000 Boiotian enraged farmers. That was the end of Sparta.
Fighters need a measure of sadism, of cruelty, but one cannot build a whole society on the basis of perversity. Sparta was a horrible, sick society. Nothing to admire or imitate.
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