The American Association of University Women and the Ms. Foundation sounded the alarm with largely uncritical media coverage and support from female-friendly politicians. Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," which lamented that "the selves of girls ... crash and burn" in our "girl-poisoning culture," became a bestseller. Take Our Daughters to Work Day became a big hit; and Congress boosted funding for programs to combat gender bias in education. Some school districts experimented with single-sex classes and even all-girl schools as an answer to the inequities supposedly pervading coed classrooms.

It probably was inevitable that sooner or later people would start asking: "But what about the boys?" Sure enough, as the Decade of the Girl drew to a close, there was a spate of articles and books pointing out that boys had their share of afflictions, including higher rates of learning disabilities, emotional disorders and suicide. "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood," a male counterpart to "Reviving Ophelia" by psychiatrist William Pollack, soared to best-sellerdom after the Columbine massacre (and a plug from Oprah Winfrey).

And now, from dissident feminist gadfly Christina Hoff Sommers, comes the provocatively titled new book "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men" (Simon & Schuster), both an addition and a challenge to the onslaught of boys-are-in-trouble literature.

The mother of two sons, Sommers makes a powerful case for treating boys with more concern and compassion, while calling for a moratorium on the depiction of girls (and boys) as psychologically crippled victims of an oppressive society. Regrettably, she doesn't base her plea for boys on the principle of individuality but often advances an overly simplistic view of sexual difference.

As expected, Sommers ably and convincingly rebuts the claims of a "girl crisis," following up on her debunking of feminist "Ms.-information" in the 1994 book "Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women." She cites a host of data -- academic sources, as well as the U.S. Department of Education -- that supports her claim that "far from being shy and demoralized, today's girls outshine boys."

Girls not only get better grades but have higher aspirations, says Sommers. She points out that in recent years, girls have outnumbered boys in advanced-placement programs, in all extracurricular activities except sports, and even in most high-level math and science courses.

More male students are "disengaged" from school, says the author, and they are pessimistic about their prospects. While boys, on average, maintain an edge on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), this is largely due to the fact that more girls from disadvantaged backgrounds take the SATs, because more of them go to college. (Overall, 55 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded in 1996 -- and 64 percent for African-Americans -- went to women.) On standardized tests taken by all schoolchildren, girls are narrowing the gender gap in math and science while boys continue to lag behind, by a much wider margin, in reading and writing.

Have girls simply benefited from actions taken to remedy the disadvantages decried by feminists in the last decade? Sommers argues that at the time the save-the-girls crusade began, girls weren't really in need of saving. By 1990, women were already earning 53 percent of college degrees, and the gender gap favoring girls on reading and writing tests was larger than the one favoring boys on math and science tests. Nor was there any real evidence that girls' self-confidence or psychological health were uniquely at risk.

And even as efforts to empower girls have undoubtedly helped them get closer to parity in some areas -- math, science, computers and athletics -- and get further ahead in others, boys' problems, says Sommers, remain virtually "invisible" to educators who remain wedded to the notion that young males are a privileged group. She describes a 1997 education conference that featured reports on several surveys showing girls to be doing better on most measures of academic and social success. These revelations, presented "somewhat apologetically," says Sommers, had zero effect on the tenor of the conference: "The allegedly tragic fate of girls in 'our sexist society' remained the dominant motif."

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