But in depicting boys as a "gender at risk," Sommers tends to gloss over crucial socioeconomic differences. Middle-class boys are generally doing as well as their sisters; it is among working-class and poor children that boys today are more likely to founder and girls to pursue more ambitious goals. And all too many children of both sexes are robbed of a quality education: Girls may be ahead in language skills, but their average reading and writing scores in 11th grade still fall short of real proficiency.

Nonetheless, it would be hard to dispute that Sommers is on to a serious problem. A mostly male underclass left in the dust by more upwardly mobile women is hardly something to celebrate. And the evidence of boys' underperformance in some key areas is strong enough to warrant targeted intervention (which, according to Sommers, has worked well in England). It's hard to see how any fair-minded person could disagree.

It is not difficult, however, to find controversy in the second part of Sommers' indictment, in which she claims that boys are being singled out for inappropriate special education in accordance with a radical feminist agenda. "The War Against Boys" describes a reign of terror created by "girl partisans" who see boys as actual or potential sexist evildoers, a climate in which "boys live under a cloud of censure, in a permanent state of culpability." Mildly ribald jokes or innocuous horseplay can lead to charges of harassment and harsh penalties; schoolchildren are herded into consciousness-raising sessions heavy on exaggerated tales of the horrors males inflict on females.

Sommers maintains that sexual misconduct should be treated no differently from the larger problems of bullying and violence in which both boys and girls can be victims and perpetrators, and that bad behavior should be seen as a matter of discipline and ethics, not gender politics.

But even though her critique of sexual harassment prevention programs is generally on target and her proposals are quite sensible, Sommers gives one little sense of whether the more egregious excesses that she describes are typical or common. (A high proportion of her examples come from elite Eastern private schools of a progressive cast.)

I happen to know that one anti-harassment curriculum she describes -- a true monstrosity which had kindergartners solemnly reciting a pledge to combat sexual harassment, and criminalized the pee-pee jokes even gender-equity experts must have told in grade school -- was introduced in a few schools in Minnesota but withdrawn after protests from parents. It might have been worth mentioning, too, that the school harassment guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Education specifically caution against overreactions like the infamous 1996 incident in which a 6-year-old boy was disciplined as a sexual harasser for kissing a little girl on the cheek.

More unfortunately, "The War Against Boys" often lapses into the sex-difference hype that seems to be enjoying a mini-vogue (see, for instance, Andrew Sullivan's recent paean to testosterone in the New York Times Magazine). It is true that not all sexual distinctions in psychology and behavior are "socially constructed," nor does it make sense that, as some feminists including Gloria Steinem have injudiciously suggested, research on biological sex differences should be stopped because it is somehow anti-woman. But by the time scientific evidence trickles down into the popular media, it is almost inevitably oversimplified and overgeneralized.

Sullivan's essay is one example. While many studies find some correlation between high testosterone levels and aggression or dominance in men, whether the hormones produce the behavior or vice versa is still unclear -- and far less is known about the role of testosterone in women. Suffice it to say that if the link were as straightforward as Sullivan implies, no woman would ever be more aggressive or competitive than any man.

"The War Against Boys" offers some similarly sweeping generalizations. Girls cuddle their dolls and exchange intimate confidences with their best friends; boys run around with toy guns and compete in physical prowess. A brief acknowledgment that boy-girl differences are matters of averages and not absolutes is relegated to an end note.

Sommers is especially alarmed by "increasingly aggressive efforts to feminize boys" under the guise of helping them -- led by feminists like Carol Gilligan, who earlier spearheaded the crusade on behalf of oppressed and silenced girls, and by their male supporters such as "Real Boys" author Pollack. In her view, these would-be saviors are just as bad as the outright boy-bashers: They want to "rescue" boys from conventional masculinity and make them "less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing -- more, in short, like girls." And to achieve their utopia of androgyny, they are willing to pathologize normal boyhood and warp the true nature of boys.

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