Instead, Califia wrote “Speaking Sex to Power, the Politics of Queer Sex.” The book is a collection of essays spanning the last six years, include those written when she was a woman wishing she was a man doing a woman, and those written when he became a man wishing he had a dick to diddle other men while wondering if women found him attractive.

“I wish it were that easy to declare my allegiance to one gender paradigm,” Califia writes. “… And to climb up on only one soapbox in the orator’s park of sexuality … There are days when it seems to me that I am tortured by my own perversity and willfulness, that if I had the right sort of subtle knife, I could sever the carping parts of my soul that will not shut up and could quit setting off the security alarms of normal people.”

Califia has a lot to say about gender identity that’s worth hearing. Like his idea that identity is not “just a matter of who believe yourself to be. It is also affected by how others perceive you … Identity has a public sphere.”

Yet there’s something a little annoying about Califia’s demand to be called whatever he feels like being called, regardless of his anatomy. He’s like a bush resenting the grass for not calling it a tree. Well, if you’ve got a bush and no trunk are you really a tree?

Califia argues yes — that gender is a state of mind more than it’s an observation of fact. And he does an admirable job of putting forth unique theories of identity. For instance, his contention that “Socially conditioned behaviors that signal gender are even more crucial than physical traits.” In other words, the way a woman is conditioned to dress, walk and behave is often seen by society as a better marker of her femaleness than her sex chromosomes, secondary sex characteristics or genitalia.

Unfortunately, Califia has a way of tossing out verbal bombs that diminish his credibility, and credibility is something he needs desperately if his more cogent observations of gender identity are to gain credence. Califia writes, “Like camp, promiscuity is the pink badge of queer courage, our defiant way of whistling past all the graveyards that, for us, dot the heterosexual landscape.” Oh, please. Promiscuity as a badge of courage? My sex advice column has generated countless letters from gay men; I’ve never been asked how they can change their political viewpoint so it could lead to a more monogamous sex life. Only an activist can ascribe political motivation to plain old dog-yard scrumping.

Or take this gem: “Every cocksucker is well aware that the same man who puts on a badge to arrest him probably just gets his blowjobs at a different truck stop.” Typical loudmouthed gay activism: Everyone’s gay; they’re just closet cases.

Califia’s writing is infected with “activistitis,” the idea that your political spouting is more interesting than your personal story. And his propensity for picking a fight instead of revealing his character can be exasperating. For example, he writes, “Does the fact that I am taking testosterone now and asking everyone to refer to me as ‘he’ invalidate the years of my life from age 17 until 45 when I was out of the closet, first as a dyke, and then as a bisexual woman?” Then after striking a pose as a lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, S/M dominatrix, she strikes one as victim: “I am to be hissed at as a deceiver, a traitor. Everything I have ever said or published about feminism or lesbianism must now be tossed on the bonfire. Every woman-identified woman I ever had sex with must move the memory of that liaison into a dubious category, and purge herself of possible heterosexual contamination. Well, it’s no less than what I expected.”

Another disappointing part of the book is the absence of pictures. This undercuts Califia’s claim to be a sexual outlaw. Since when are radicals afraid to show their faces?

It’s understandable to think that pictures might lend a circus atmosphere to the sober tone of his subject, but by not providing pictures Califia lets the rhetoric float in an intellectual surface without ever descending into the emotional realm, where understanding and acceptance take place.

Yes, it would be shocking to see a busty leather dyke morph into a flat-chested, hairy gay man, but shock is always the initial reaction to the different. Would “Will and Grace” have broken down barriers if it had been a radio show? Califia, the audacious fire-breathing dragon-activist is a closet-encrusted prude. Come out, come out, Patrick, wherever you are.

Califia is at his best when he bares his soul instead of his fangs. It’s hard to ignore his humanity when he writes, “Compassion for myself has been at least as healing as daily application of testosterone gel to my fuzzy belly, chest, and face. I know that I deserve to have pleasure in my life even if my body puzzles and thwarts me.”

And his love for his son, Blake, is palpable: “Love for a child may be the most all-encompassing emotion that I have ever experienced. You cannot break up with your child or divorce him. When adult lovers have left (or, more typically, been sent away), I usually experience more relief than sorrow. But the love I feel for Blake is not susceptible to alteration, no matter what he might do in the future or whom he might become. I could not escape from it if I tried. And in truth I do not want to, because the weight and scent of his little body in my arms has made me his happy possession.”

Although it’s heavy on the irritation factor, this book is a must-read for anyone who has ever experienced the torture of being different, of not belonging. Califia has a deft way of both eulogizing and celebrating otherness. “The only consolation for this sense of alienation,” he writes, “is the fact that there’s no place where I don’t belong. Having shed most of the strictures of identity politics, I can take what I like from the entire spectrum of sexual minority cultures.”

These hyper-adorable mutants, seemingly the demonic offspring of Shirley Temple and Japanese anime, are known as the Powerpuff Girls, and their bug-eyed faces and bloated heads can be spotted on everything from dolls to watches to CD cases to mousepads to boxes of cereal. Just four years after “The Powerpuff Girls” first aired on Cartoon Network, the Powerpuff franchise has made $1 billion from retail merchandise, and with “The Powerpuff Girls” movie on the way, the wee trio’s popularity is likely to reach even greater heights.

To their loyal fans and amused admirers, these kindergarten rabble-rousers represent something bigger than the next Hello Kitty. For hyper-analytical adults and avid third-wave feminists, they’re animated proof that strong female characters can kick ass and take names without compromising their femininity. For children, and those grown-ups weary of gender-centric postulation, the teensy heroines do viewers the favor of skipping or skewering fancy-schmancy politics in the service of good humor.

The show does mark a dramatic departure from boy-centered rough-’em-up cartoons and pink, fluffy girl-centered fare. Yet, striking as these icons of girlhood may be, it could be argued that their popularity may not reflect a dramatic shift in our society’s view of gender roles, but rather our inability to stomach female anger unless it’s sugarcoated in cuteness and scored with a pervasively chirpy, nonthreatening tone.

Tough heroines are certainly the flavor of the month — as evidenced by shows like “Alias” and “She Spies” — but do these shows echo real changes in our culture’s concept of gender, or are they just a passing trend? Can female power truly be respected if it’s consistently packaged as supernaturally sexy or freakishly cute? When we cheer on a little girl who knocks a villain’s teeth out, are we cheering female power, or is it all an inside joke, an exercise in absurdity that plays on existing injustices? Is Lara Croft powerful because she can take you down, or because you’d like her to go down on you?

Craig McCracken, creator of “The Powerpuff Girls,” insists that the show’s key ingredient is gender blindness: “I don’t think of them as girls; I think of them as kids,” he says. “We’ve never said, ‘What would a girl do?’ It’s always, ‘What would a kid do?’” This comment rings true, especially when McCracken relates his nascent views on evolving feminism. “There’s this new feminism that’s coming up that’s embracing things that are typically girlish, and not saying, ‘Oh, in order to be a feminist you have to denounce all of that pink stuff and baby Ts,’” he says with great sincerity. “You can have all those things and be sexy and be feminine and be typically girlish and still be a feminist. I mean, my girlfriend ["Powerpuff Girls" storyboard artist Lauren Faust] basically taught me a lot of that …”

It’s tough to dislike a guy who humbly credits his girlfriend for his feminist sensibilities. “Her whole frustration is that I did this accidentally,” McCracken says of Faust, whom he met after she came to work on the show. “She’s always wanted to make this type of show on purpose, and I just kind of stumbled into it. And she’s like, ‘You have no idea what you’ve done. This is a great message!’ And I’m like, ‘I was just having fun. I just thought it was a cool idea.’”

According to the opening scenes of the TV show, the Powerpuff Girls’ caretaker, Professor Utonium, created them from “sugar, spice, and everything nice” — along with a dash of “Chemical X,” a compound responsible for the girls’ ability to fly and land brutal punches. Their hyperfemininity — a result, no doubt, of the sugar-and-spice part of the formula — seems to begin and end with the huge eyes and high voices. Sure, Bubbles likes drawing pretty pictures, but Blossom is mastering conversational Chinese, and Buttercup would rather throw punches than play with little ponies. The girls are boisterous and pushy and careless, just as any kids might be — personalities that seem to draw in both boys and girls. In fact, boys make up a slight majority (56 percent) of the Powerpuffs’ child audiences, according to Cartoon Network figures.

As for adult viewers, many embrace the Powerpuff Girls specifically for their girliness: a trio of the littlest third-wave feminists, they’re capable and tough but sweet and alluring. And even as he purports to be a political naif, McCracken plays to such fans and other grown-ups — inadvertently, perhaps — with a generous amount of clever gender bending. Professor Utonium, the girls’ caretaker and creator, behaves more like a worried mother than a macho boss, gently guiding the girls to do the right thing, then secretly worrying about being a bad parent. When a call comes from the mayor of Townsville, warning the girls that yet another villain is attacking, the professor doesn’t field the call and issue orders like Bosley of Charlie’s Angels. Instead, he kvetches over the interruption of bath time and bedtime while the girls spring into action.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Townsville is portrayed as an incompetent clod, while his secretary, Ms. Sarah Bellum, a buxom babe whose face we never see, whispers suggestions in his ear like a political Cyrano. And one of the girls’ most feared adversaries, “Him,” is a strangely creepy devil in drag who McCracken says was inspired by the Blue Meanies from “Yellow Submarine.”

In fact, McCracken toys with all the aspects of culture — pop and political — by mixing unabashed earnestness with unrepentant irony. A ’60s-style gung-ho narrator cheers and eggs the girls on while providing a running voice-over of wisecracks, undercuts, and anxious asides. As with classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, the pop cultural references come at lightning speed, and there are so many layers of meaning to navigate, it’s sometimes impossible to tell what the real message is.

In one episode, evil monkey Mojo Jojo — one of the girls’ most entertainingly weird foes — bestows superpowers on three kids at school by giving them some Chemical X. In the end, the kids agree that they should “just say no,” but when another kid asks them how it felt to have superpowers, they all scream, “It was awesome!” In another episode, upon discovering the existence of a tooth fairy, Buttercup gets busy knocking the teeth out of every villain in town and putting them under her pillow until she has a huge bag of coins stashed under her bed.

Instead of painting children as idealized, angelic little innocents and assuming that young viewers can’t understand anything but absurdly simple plots, the show’s creators fearlessly give us kids as they are — impulsive to the point of being reckless, imaginative to the point of being self-involved, and misguided to the point of being downright weird. By focusing on kids without getting bogged down in gender, McCracken manages to portray his young characters realistically, thereby appealing to young audiences who recognize themselves and to adult audiences who enjoy recalling the ways their minds worked as children.

The movie won’t disappoint fans of the show. The story is something of a prequel in which we learn how the girls decided to use their powers to help the city of Townsville. At first, like any other kids, they have a lot of destructive fun with their abilities, ripping up roads and blowing stuff up in a game of tag that’s a visual parody of those absurd chase scenes in big-budget action thrillers. But eventually, Mojo Jojo threatens to take over the town from his not-so-secret secret hideout, and the girls leap into action, superhero style.

While it’s tough to sit through two hours of any cartoon, this is no “Pokémon,” a movie that killed its franchise’s golden goose. The Powerpuff Girls movie shares all the rapid references, jokes and dry humor of the show — as well as its flexibility about gender. At a low point, when Mojo and his cronies have almost won, the girls are reunited with Professor Utonium, who performs that Teri Garr “Stop trying to save the world and finish your dinner” role like a fussy queen. “Oh, girls! Thank goodness you’re OK!” he says as he hugs them. “Now let’s get out of this town and find a new, safe place to live!”

No one tells the girls to save the day. All the townspeople, including the professor, are frightened wimps who are only out for themselves. The girls have to decide as a group whether to help. Instead of being too good to be true, they struggle with the decision like normal kids.

But for all the unspoken lessons in ethics, the movie and the TV show avoid the heavy-handed morality of other children’s fare, and this subtlety may be another reason the girls have become a symbol for some adult fans. One of Groucho Marx’s most memorable quips might be rewritten for our times as, “I wouldn’t belong to any target demographic that would have me as a member.” Despite the tendency of marketing executives to see the world through the haze of peer-group goggles, real human beings dislike being lumped into categories. Thus, the absence of Powerpuff T-shirts and movie posters that say, “Girls Rule!” or “Girls Kick Ass!” may be a testament to both the wisdom and the self-restraint of the franchise.

Of course it makes complete sense in a world without gender-role stereotypes that these superheroes never tout their appeal as females or decry the unfairness of being girls. Why should they, when their daddy is a mommy, their boss is their boss’s female secretary, and their foes are always, ultimately, conquerable without the help of outside forces? That our heroes’ girl-ness is beside the point might just be the most revolutionary aspect of the show.

In some ways, these likable squeeze toys have pulled off the ultimate branding feat: They represent girl power without having to mention it. Given a recent Gallup poll that found that only 25 percent of women today consider themselves feminists, the Powerpuff Girls may reflect a shift from embracing political and social labels to choosing between carefully packaged products that have ideologies encoded deep within their shiny exteriors.

Firmly held beliefs are naturally rife with stigmas, awkward internal contradictions, and ideological pitfalls. But in a branded universe, such beliefs are reduced to unspoken preferences, revealed only when the light is shining directly on them — and even then, they sparkle as subtly as body glitter. Why take on a political label when you can wear a cool-looking T-shirt that says the same thing, but without any of the negative associations? Is she a feminist? Oh, no! She just loves those Powerpuff Girls!

Can a new generation of gender-blind Powerpuffs conquer inequality simply by optimistically refusing to recognize its existence? For many girls today, this approach seems to work. They don’t cry out against inequality; they simply take for granted that the world will treat them fairly — and in some cases the world seems to follow suit. “Of course I should be able to play football, or wrestle,” they tell us nonchalantly, as if suggesting otherwise is downright absurd — and it is, isn’t it? A lot of boys seem to agree. (McCracken is one of them.) Power isn’t something that many women feel they should have to struggle for. And for them, dressing sexily or behaving cute is beside the point — those things should enhance their personal power, not diminish it.

It’s tough to disagree with such a refreshingly self-actualized approach, particularly since it eliminates the need to put a male face on oppression. Perhaps assuming that justice will prevail is the quickest route to achieving justice. Still, with the rise of the sexy heroine in movies like “Tomb Raider” and “Enough” and TV shows like “Alias,” “Dark Angel” and “She Spies,” the more salient question for budding feminists may not be whether it’s acceptable to be powerful and pretty at the same time, but whether being powerful without being pretty is even an option.

When Janet Reno’s appearance garners more sniping than her policies, and Britney Spears’ looks get more glowing reviews than her songs, it’s difficult to see how real power in the absence of beauty could ever be enticing to a new generation of girls, even with the help of the Powerpuffs. Power that depends on beauty may remain forever in the eye — and in the hands — of the beholder.

Still, the real impact of “The Powerpuff Girls” may lie in its unrelenting focus on giddy fun for the sake of fun, its hints of a new era of popular art that plays with gender instead of struggling under the weight of it, thereby creating an imaginary world as appealing as it is unbound by archaic stereotypes.

To protect the victim’s privacy, Urban’s editors decided not to run his photos. Yet one shot’s gritty reality was submitted and won the domestic news (newspaper) category in the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism contest, a distinction rewarded with publication of the photo online and soon in a book.

But just what reality oozed into public light?

Clearly exposed is mob mentality as multihued hands press both breasts, and fingers jam through her panties. Some guys try to crawl over others to cop a feel. Smiley faces crane for a peek as one happy dude whips out a camcorder to preserve the special moment.

The scene has been pegged an act of violence, showing how quickly the line between civility and brutality can be tripped. Reports say the forced group-grope was one of many that festive night. But the Mardi Gras molesters cannot be dismissed as perverted monsters. They look jovial, clueless, entitled. They are the guys next door, our sons, caught up in an extreme rendering of “boys will be boys.”

I know the party line of defining sexual assault as violence, as power abuse, not sex. But tossing this mass violation into some aberrant cesspool allows us to dissociate from the perpetrators and rise above the sexual stench of our own making. Can you view this photo of clean-cut guys as they revel in mauling anonymous body parts, and not wonder: “How are we raising our boys?”

Since researching my book on America’s schizophrenic approach to sexuality, I’m often struck by how we insist on handing boys the short end of the sexual development stick. As our chastity-crusading commander in chief plunders public education and health to prove that sex without marriage causes death, disease and despair, boys receive a mere nod in the battle cry for abstinence.

In fact, the fear and shame-based abstinence-until-marriage programs funded by our tax dollars and sweeping the nation absolve boys of sexual responsibility by reinforcing tired gender roles. Boys are portrayed as slaves to their throbbing key in desperate need to unlock any warm hole. Girls are taught how and why to resist boys’ predictable predatory push. Boys will be boys, girls must be gatekeepers.

Traditionalists, evolutionary psychologists and popular culture regurgitate this “fact of human nature” as divine truth. To suggest that sex ebbs and flows along a dynamic continuum between the genders, or that man is more complex than his boner, is sacrilege. Or as Bill Maher says on “Politically Incorrect,” “a lot of nonsense.” In a recent episode, where Maher deems men are “just after pussy,” Dr. Drew Pinsky of radio’s syndicated “Loveline” claims males are sexually driven by uncontrollable urges and should not be pathologized.

“We’ve made men to feel guilty and to feel bad about who they are,” says Pinsky, “but the reality is that men do need to be contained and tamed, and we’d be sort of flinging poo if we didn’t have a social order.”

Apparently that social order dumps the self-restraint load on the female half of the species. Boys must try, girls must stop them. With all the hype about today’s promiscuous kids causing chaos and the moral decline of our nation, male sexual behavior has changed very little. Studies show that rates of sexual intercourse for boys have remained steady or declined since the good ol’ days. Current sermonizing by the right and sensationalizing by the media is really about fear of today’s jacked-up female sexuality — what’s good for the gander, we are told, is dangerous for the goose.

And kids learn our double standard well. A current study led by Indiana University School of Medicine’s Gregory D. Zimet shows that boys who initiate sex have high self-esteem, whereas girls who initiate sex have low self-esteem. Although Zimet suggests stud-slut societal dynamics at play, he tells Reuters, “Clearly, it makes little sense to try to lower the self-esteem of young adolescent boys.” He adds that “the findings do suggest that helping girls to feel more self-confidence and self-respect may help them to delay initiation of sexual intercourse.”

Great, forget teaching our boys sexual mutuality. Let’s turn back the clock and help our girls more confidently play the traditional push-and-pull game of sex. Certainly the path pounded by conservative peddlers of virginity and marriage to cure America’s social ills — everything from poverty, teenage pregnancy and crime to general depletion of decency — leads to cooling the improper sexual heat of girls.

At my first sexuality conference three years ago, I interviewed a sex therapist from the South who was surprised that the 1996 Welfare Reform Act’s funding of abstinence-only programs had stirred me into the field of sexology. “Well, if I had a daughter,” he said, “I’d want her to save it for marriage. There’s a lot of crazy shit out there these days.”

“Did you teach your two sons to save themselves for marriage?” I asked.

“Nah, I didn’t talk to them about sex,” he grinned. “They’re boys. They knew what to do.”

In my research I often meet men of all ages and backgrounds whose parents told them zero about sex. Many were slipped a Playboy or porn video as soon as their voices started changing. A surprising number had a dad who dragged them at around age 15 to a prostitute, or brothel in Las Vegas or Amsterdam, to learn to become a man.

But as long as we play the antediluvian “me virile man, you virtuous woman” script on this modern stage of equality, freedom and mass-marketed sexuality, we’ll remain clueless when wild parties go bad. Too many cherry-popping contests, frat-party trains and other gangbangs are treated as cautionary tales for immodest girls. But what about harm to the male psyche when coercive sex is shrugged off as opportune release or right of passage?

Now that I am pregnant, several childless acquaintances have been pleased to learn that I’m having a boy. “I’d probably want a boy,” they say. “Girls are more difficult. You have to worry about them getting pregnant or date raped.”

But why not worry about your son impregnating or raping someone’s daughter? Girls don’t do these things to themselves. Are the consequences less profound when you’re not part of the cleanup crew?

A psychologist and sex educator for more than 25 years, Bob Selverstone trains parents how to raise their kids to be sexually healthy adults. He often shares one study that shows when moms talk to sons and daughters about sex, both delay initiation. When dads talk to daughters, they delay. When dads talk to sons, they accelerate. The implication is that although dads want to protect the innocence of their daughters, their dominant message to sons is “go for it.”

But despite the schoolyard euphemisms of first base, second, third and home run, sex is not about scoring. Sex is most explosive when it’s about connecting, giving as much as receiving. If I don’t teach my son sexual respect and responsibility — or that sex is so much more than poking body parts and getting off — then I shouldn’t be surprised at some future Mardi Gras to see his face in a sea of other red-blooded males “seizing the moment,” as someone else’s daughter silently screams.

Unfortunately for those American researchers who might wish to end the debate about how boys learn, and whether it is substantially different from the way girls do, there is little in the British experiment so far to give either side a basis for victory.

In 1998, in response to public concern about low reading scores, particularly among boys, the British government launched the “Literacy Hour,” a compulsory reading program in all primary schools. The goal of the program was to have 80 percent of 11-year-olds reading at or above grade level by fall 2002. (British Secretary of Education David Blunkett even promised to resign if the target was not met.)

The “Literacy Hour” model emphasizes phonics, spelling, diction and grammar and requires highly structured whole-class (as opposed to individual, or student-led) instruction. Teachers and parents are advised not to urge their children to do advanced reading until they have mastered the basics. Parents also are encouraged to read with their children for at least 20 minutes a day (and employers are encouraged to give parents time off to read to their children).

The results of the “Literacy Hour,” which is still ongoing, have been mixed so far: Reading scores have improved by 10 percentage points over the last three years (and math scores by 12 percentage points), but progress may have stalled. In 2001, most age groups showed no improvement at all from the previous year.

Since the late 1980s, some British schools also have been experimenting with programs targeted explicitly at boys, operating on the assumption, favored by one wing of American researchers, that boys and girls are genetically programmed with different learning styles. To both acknowledge and accommodate the special needs of boys, the British programs have called upon schools to hire more male teachers to mentor boys, load their reading curricula with boy-centric books and institute single-sex reading classes.

Has this approach worked? The answer seems to be a definite “well, sometimes.”

In a London Times article from June 2001, reporter Julie Hendry noted that “the Department for Education and Employment’s own analysis shows that girls seem to be gaining more from the strategies that schools have adopted than the boys they are aimed at.”

Another article from the London Sunday Times, also from last year, describes how a British high school used a “gender agenda” to bring boys academically up to speed and, ultimately, surpass girls in grades and reading scores. Reporter Lucy Adams described the school’s special approach thusly: “Books which specifically appeal to boys, such as Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm,’ were introduced to the curriculum, and single-sex classes were created for boys to avoid the embarrassment of discussing metaphors in front of girls.”

In the article, Adams focused on one young man, a football player, who discovered that “English might not be so bad after all” after his teacher assigned him to write a sonnet to his favorite football team. The results: “A year later he was savouring the narrative of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and the blood and guts of ‘Hamlet.’”

This sounds like success, but one has to wonder: When did the public schools stop teaching books like “Animal Farm”? And isn’t asking a boy to write a sonnet to a football team just as sexist as teaching female engineering students how to design shopping carts (which professors at Smith College’s engineering project purportedly did last year)? What’s more, the fact that girls’ scores did not keep up suggests that perhaps the boy-based curriculum may have been at their expense.

What seems more likely to have worked in this school, and in the British schools with special programs aimed at boys, is the same thing that works for children of any gender anywhere: The boys were singled out for special attention. Their parents were asked to limit TV and video games; they were given a strict homework schedule, which their parents were asked to check each night.

In fact, several recent studies seem to confirm that any gains made by schoolchildren may have less to do with teaching to gender and more to do with simply paying more attention to students. A study conducted by the Centre for Educational Sociology at Edinburgh University reported in the fall of 2001 that “while most teachers and pupils believed single-sex classes were the best way to bridge the gender gap in achievement, smaller [mixed gender] classes were much more effective.” (In addition, these researchers found that more than half of boys think that appearing to work hard is “uncool,” while only one quarter of girls feel the same way.)

Children develop their learning styles between the ages of four and eight, according to another study conducted in Glasgow. But 10 percent of girls “learned like boys” (i.e., were more visual-kinesthetic learners, more spatially aware, preferred active rather than passive learning and wanted to know “the big picture”), and 20 percent of boys “learned like girls” (i.e., they were more auditory learners and linear thinkers, more interested in verbal and linguistic expression and more detail-oriented). The finding suggests that dividing children into single-sex classrooms in an attempt to accommodate gender differences may actually put a significant portion of students at a disadvantage.

It remains to be seen whether the inconclusive outcome of British attempts to teach to gender will have an impact on how Americans decide to help boys. But for the moment, lads in both places still have much in common: In an international survey conducted last year by the Program for International Assessment, a French-based international consortium of educational researchers, American girls beat the boys by 28 points in reading; British boys were bested by a 26-point margin.

From the beginning, critics of the empowerment movement claimed that creating special programs for girls was sexist. Later, other researchers — most prominently Diane Ravitch, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former assistant secretary of education, and Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the 1992 book “Who Stole Feminism” and “The War Against Boys” — began to question whether there had ever been a “girl crisis” in the first place. These critics painted the feminist leaders of the girl empowerment movement as adult women who were somewhat hysterically looking for evidence of patriarchal coercion where none existed, in order to correct inequities that had been solved by the previous generation.

Critics of empowerment efforts didn’t dispute that girls at one point had been discriminated against in education, but claimed that by 1990, those inequities had largely been erased, and that girls had already begun to overtake boys in many academic and social areas. As Ravitch told a New York Times reporter, “It might have been the right story 20 years earlier, but coming out when it did, it was like calling a wedding a funeral.”

Regardless of exactly when it began to happen, it appears now that American girls have made outstanding progress in academic achievement. Some researchers credit the empowerment movement; others say it was superfluous. But what is certain is that recent studies indicate that girls have significantly bridged historical gender gaps in math and science scores (and in some studies, have eliminated them entirely) and have held on to their historical advantage over boys in reading and writing skills.

At the same time, according to those studies, boys have not made the same progress in eliminating their side of the gender gap. Suddenly, the debate among researchers is focused on the boys: Are they behind because of the girl empowerment movement? Are they being shortchanged in the classroom simply because they are boys?

Just last month, the results of a study that tested 15-year-old students in 32 industrialized nations reflected that girls score much higher than boys in reading and [in most countries, including the United States] are on par with the boys in math and science. Authors of the report, issued by PISA (the Program for International Assessment, a French-based international consortium of educational researchers), called the reverse gender gap “striking.”

Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Center for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, a Washington-based think tank, and a higher education policy analyst for Postsecondary Education Opportunity, based in Iowa, says that in his 30-year career devoted to eliminating gender imbalances in education, he has witnessed a troubling shift.

“Right around 1990, it hit me that girls had made extraordinary progress between 1970 and 1990,” he says. “For me, it was one of those 180-degree reversals: Now I believe that boys are the ones with a gender disadvantage in education. They are where the girls were 25 years ago.”

According to the U.S. Department of Education, American girls have been ahead of boys in reading in studies for every year on record, beginning in 1969. But as girls move ahead in math and science, the reverse gender gap, which has shown up on dozens of local and national studies, becomes all the more pronounced.

(The most pressing and intractable educational gaps in the United States are still undeniably those of race and socioeconomic status. American students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to educational discrimination and underachievement: On the PISA study, American students recorded the highest gap out of all participating countries between students in the top and bottom quarter of wealth.)

A study released in June by the U.S. Department of Education indicated that the average 16-year-old boy has the reading skills of an average 14-year-old girl. Equally dramatic gaps have show up in local studies in Boston, Chicago and New York. On the last Regents exam in New York City, 70 percent more girls than boys had exemplary scores in reading and writing; 45 percent more boys than girls scored well below grade level. There were no gender gaps reported on the math or science sections of the exam. (Of the dozen or so articles that appeared in the New York Post lamenting the dismal performance of New York City students, the question of gender was never raised, outside of reporting the raw data.)

Additional studies show that girls, on average, also have better grades in high school and college and are more likely to be enrolled in accelerated or advanced-placement classes. Boys are much more likely to be held back, diagnosed with a learning disability or put in a remedial or special education class. College admission and graduate rates for girls have soared since 1950. They now constitute the majority of college students and college graduates. And girls earned 57.2 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2000; boys earned 42.8 percent.

All in all, this adds up to a rather bleak picture for boys, unless one considers college entrance scores and studies that look at the success of adult men and women. Those who wish to address the issue of educational inequity for boys are caught between the empirical data, which shows very real gender gaps for young boys and college-age men, and the perception that boys can’t be doing so terribly, if adult men are still doing relatively well, or at least outperforming women.

Boys continue to outperform girls on the SAT, which is a requirement for admission to the majority of American universities. In 2000, girls scored, on average, 38 fewer points than boys overall (35 points on the math portion; 3 on the verbal). Similar gaps also show up on the PSAT, the SAT II, the ACT and the Graduate Entrance Exam, and though girls are more likely to take advanced-placement classes, boys are more likely to achieve the higher scores needed to attain college credit for these classes. And once they are in the workplace, men still earn more than women (although that gap is closing) and represent the majority of CEOs, politicians and high-wage earners in all industrialized countries.

There have been any number of recent books on what is described by some as a looming educational crisis for boys and men, including many that focus on the special needs and challenges of boys, particularly in adolescence. But a full-blown campaign to reempower boys seems a long way off, possibly because those who concur that boys need help cannot agree on the source of their educational problems or the appropriate methods of relief. While the girl empowerment campaign united women from very different backgrounds and philosophies — academics like Carol Gilligan, popular writers like Mary Pipher, journalists like Anna Quindlen and Peggy Orenstein, political organizations like the National Organization of Women and researchers in the American Association of University Women — there is nowhere near this kind of unity in the movement to help boys. In fact, many of the leaders in the movement to empower boys are actively fighting each other.

Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, author of the 1982 book “In a Different Voice,” is widely credited with (and, by her critics, denounced for) kick-starting the girl empowerment movement. She was among the first to argue that women experience relationships, morality and communication differently than men, and are therefore silenced in a culture in which the male experience stands in for the universal human experience.

Some of Gilligan’s early critics took exception to her so-called difference feminism, fearing that any theory that relied on essential gender difference could be used to rationalize discrimination against women. But it’s difficult to overstate just how big a star Gilligan is in the field of gender studies: Throughout the ’80s and ’90s she was routinely awarded major honors; in 1997 she received the Heinz award for “transforming the paradigm of what it means to be human” and in 2001, Jane Fonda donated $12.5 million to fund a chair at Harvard in Gilligan’s name.

In 1990, Gilligan applied her theories of women’s psychological development to explain the underachievement of girls. She claimed that girls experience a crisis of confidence in early adolescence, which leads them to become less assertive and outspoken and more uncertain about their futures. To many people, Gilligan’s work became the core around which to build a national movement to reform education.

Gilligan’s concern for adolescent girls was almost immediately picked up and shared by educators, journalists, parents, teachers and popular writers, including clinical psychologist Mary Pipher, whose bestselling “Reviving Ophelia” claimed that America’s sexualized, lookist, media-saturated “girl poisoning” culture led post-feminist American girls to be “much more oppressed” than ever before. Pipher blamed this oppression for girls’ alleged low self-esteem, suicides, self-mutilation and low math scores. (“Just as planes and ships disappear into the Bermuda Triangle,” wrote Pipher, “so do the selves of girls go down in droves.”) Critics, like Hoff Sommers, pointed out that some of these problems — especially suicide and behavior disorders — overwhelmingly affected more boys than girls.

But more important, Gilligan’s claim led other researchers to try to prove with empirical data that girls were being harmed by sexism in the schools. In 1991, the American Association of University Women released a report, “Schools Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which purported to confirm Gilligan’s thesis that girls suffer a crisis of self-esteem during adolescence that leaves them much less confident in their abilities. This was followed in 1992 by another AAUW study, “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” which placed the responsibility for girls’ underachievement directly on the sexist attitudes of educators — in public and private schools — who failed to provide girls with adequate classroom attention.

The AAUW studies almost immediately became a battleground in the p.c. wars. They were heavily attacked by Hoff Sommers and others, who claimed that they were tendentious and riddled with methodological errors. But the studies were publicized by popular journalists and writers and their recommendations lobbied for by powerful national women’s organizations.

In the end, the view that society was shortchanging girls prevailed. Advocates for girls succeeded in putting pressure on Congress to pass the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act, which provided millions of dollars in support for programs aimed at correcting sexism in the classroom, including special math and science programs for girls, sensitivity workshops for educators and new textbooks that corrected gender stereotypes (i.e., women as nurses, men as doctors).

Eventually, many of the leaders of the movement to empower girls joined their critics in calling for new research into how to remedy educational and social inequities for boys. In fact, Gilligan launched a three-year study called “The Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology, Boy’s Development and the Culture of Manhood” in 1995.

By the end of the ’90s, a passel of boy-centered books were published. But unlike many of the girl-centered books published earlier in the decade, many of these authors actively disagreed with one another. On one side were old-school feminists and their sympathizers, who believed that boys, like girls before them, were victims of patriarchal definitions of masculinity. These thinkers — including Gilligan (for whom the learning differences between the sexes are the result of patriarchy, not biology) and, to some extent William Pollack, the author of 1998′s “Real Boys” — see the salvation of boys in reconstructing outmoded notions of masculinity, in much the same way that feminists once agitated to reconstruct society’s definitions and expectations of femininity.

Others, like Michael Gurian, author of “The Wonder of Boys” and the just-released “The Wonder of Girls,” argue that boys and girls learn in fundamentally different ways, and that academic success and personal happiness for children of both genders can be achieved only by returning to traditional notions of sex and gender. Hoff Sommers adds, in “The War Against Boys,” that boys have been the victims of feminists like Gilligan (and to some extent, boy advocates like Pollack), whose outmoded disdain for patriarchy and capitalism have “pathologized” what she considers to be normal masculinity.

Scholars like Gurian, Gilligan, Hoff Sommers and Pollack also disagree about who, if anyone, is to blame for boys’ poor academic performance: Were boys actually villainized in the process of empowering girls? Are gender differences hard-wired? If so, how does one explain the extraordinary progress of girls in math, science and higher education — areas where they are supposedly destined to show weakness?

Without agreement on the origins of the crisis, these scholars also cannot agree on how to deal with the crisis. Once again, the debate questions whether gender differences in learning are deeply ingrained or sheer mythology. Some suggest that reading curricula be more “masculine” in order to engage boys; others say that boys must be encouraged to embrace their “feminine” side. There are even advocates who call for a return to single-sex education, a debate that should sound familiar to anyone who followed the girls education debate.

It used to be accepted wisdom that boys and girls learned differently: Boys were thought to be better at spatial reasoning, abstract concepts and deductive reasoning, while girls had an easier time with concrete detail, intuition and evaluation, and inductive reasoning.

Researchers like Hoff Sommers tend to agree with the theory that gender differences that affect learning are hard-wired and should be considered in dealing with the learning delays of boys. She maintains, for instance, that reading preferences are gender specific, and that the current English curriculum favors the reading tastes of girls, an inequity that has led to the lower scores of boys in reading literacy.

“Our English classes are strongly feminized, even in boys schools,” says Hoff Sommers. “We want literature to make boys more sensitive. But I’m not sure that we need to invest in literature as a form of therapy.”

She points out that a majority of English teachers still assign fiction in the classroom, while she believes that boys prefer nonfiction. (In the PISA study, girls and boys were asked to self-report on the kind of reading materials they preferred. Boys reported reading more comic books, Web pages and newspapers, while girls read more novels.)

“Boys love adventure stories with male heroes,” says Hoff Sommers. “Many would love books by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Clancy. Since they are so far behind in reading, why not give them texts they enjoy? Some teachers are promoting political correctness at the expense of the basic literacy of their male students.

“My own son had to struggle through Amy Tan’s ‘Joy Luck Club’ when he was in the 10th grade,” she adds. “It has some attractive features, but it is full of annoying psychobabble about women and their self-esteem struggles. He disliked it. If teachers are going to assign books in popular literature, they should consider the needs and interests of boys.”

Another advocate of “guy lit” is Jon Scieszka, author of such children’s books as “Stinky Cheese Man” and founder of Guys Read, a nonprofit literacy program for boys. On his Web site, Scieszka writes, “There are literacy programs for adults, for students of English as a second language, for women, and for prison inmates. There are no literacy programs for boys.”

Scieszka goes on to recommend what he considers to be “guy books.” His choices for elementary school boys include David Macaulay, the author of the “How Things Work” series, classic authors of the strange, like Roald Dahl and Daniel Pinkwater, and Lemony Snicket, author of the wildly popular new series “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Teenage boys are advised to read Alan Moore, the author of popular literary graphic novels like “From Hell” and “Watchman”; while adult men get, of course, Gurian and William Pollack. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Scieszka lamented the popularity with English teachers of books like “Little House on the Prairie,” which he says boys find boring.

Some believers in genetic gender differences go even further, suggesting that classrooms, as well as lesson plans, need to be boy-friendly.

A significant concern, says Mortenson, is the fact that 85 percent of elementary school teachers are female. This imbalance, he says, is compounded by the fact that the percentage of children living in single-parent families headed by women is growing, leaving more and more boys without significant male figures in daily life. Mortenson now suggests that little boys may need an entirely different kind of teaching style altogether, one that emphasizes physical activity over traditional sedentary desk learning.

“We need targeted programs for little boys incorporated in the K through 12 system,” he says. “We know that boys are, on average, at least a year behind girls in maturity levels. Maybe you have different start dates for kindergarten.

“If I were teaching,” says Mortenson, “I would get boys out of the classroom. Take them to a swamp, dig through the muck, look for pollywogs. Then maybe take them back and have them look at pond water through slides and write up a lab report. They need hands-on activities. They get bored and distracted if you ask them to sit down and reading a chapter and writing up a paragraph — the kind of work that girls excel at.”

Michael Gurian takes the idea of single sex learning even further. In his 1998 book “A Fine Young Man,” Gurian proposes that we do away with Title IX, the provision that prohibits discrimination in public education based on gender. To support his argument, he maintains that gender differences, unlike racial differences, are so great as to nearly constitute a different species altogether.

“There are no structural brain differences between the physiologies of the races except for the most cosmetic kind,” he wrote. “Between males and females, there are at least seven structural brain differences.”

Gurian proposes, among other things, that boys and girls be taught in single-sex classrooms for math, science and language arts, then spend afternoons in co-educational classes.

But the move to single-sex education in the United States, especially for boys, is likely to be next to impossible to accomplish politically. Though a handful of public charter schools for boys — usually poor African-Americans — have been attempted, most have been vetoed or shut down soon after opening. And witness the protest raised over the Young Women’s Leadership Academy, a girls-only public school in East Harlem: Although the school is still in operation, both the ACLU and the National Organization for Women are suing the district on the basis that public funds should not be used to segregate students by gender. Meanwhile, the chancellor of New York City schools has rejected requests to fund a similar school for boys, on the basis that the girls school made up for past gender inequities in education.

Carol Gilligan is not convinced that the educational problems of boys are due to hard-wired biological differences. Instead, she suggests that the gender differences in education are caused by culture and psychology.

“We know there is nothing innately different in children’s learning abilities,” she says. “We used to say that difficulty in math and science was innate to womanhood. Well, it turns out that it is not. Over the past 10 years, we started paying attention to girls’ development in math and sciences, formally and informally, and — behold! — the gender gap disappeared.”

Gilligan acknowledges that no causal studies have been done to link the girl empowerment movement to the improved academic performance of girls, but points out that the closing of the gender gap in math and science coincided with the years of the feminist movement. And while critics still debate whether these gaps were already closing in 1990, when the girl empowerment movement took off, there is no question that girls’ academic performance — particularly in math, science, and college enrollment — improved enormously in the years between 1970 and 2001.

While this fact alone may not prove the effectiveness of the gender equity in education movement, it certainly suggests strong support for the argument that historical gender gaps in achievement are not an inevitable product of biology, and therefore, with the proper attention, can be resolved.

In her own research on boys, Gilligan claims to have found that boys, like girls, experience a crisis of self-confidence, though this change comes earlier for boys — around age 4 to 5, coincidentally the exact moment when children are first introduced to school and reading. Gilligan attributes much of this anxiety to the forced separation of boys from their mothers under patriarchy, which leaves them alienated from their emotions and anything in the culture that is associated with feminity.

In American culture, says Gilligan, children learn to associate math and science with masculinity; knowledge of the human world and emotional lives are associated with femininity. But, she says, “to be fully human, you need to understand both worlds.” Gilligan does not believe that boys need their own reading lists; change, she says, does not come from segregation of curricula or teaching style. In fostering the empowerment of girls, she says, “we began by telling girls that math and science are interesting. Now we need to tell boys that reading — that emotion — is interesting.”

Hoff Sommers derides Gilligan’s theory for seeming to attribute pathology to normal children and suggests that the literal separation of children from their fathers, not the metaphorical separation from their mothers, can better explain the overall problems suffered by boys in relation to school performance, aggression and arrest.

All agree, however, that any significant impact on a gender gap in learning will require political action. Certainly that was true when it came to girls.

Gilligan believes that part of the difficulty in lobbying for change for boys can be attributed to men’s squeamishness when asked to embrace traits that have traditionally been associated with women. “Within patriarchy,” says Gilligan, “manhood is privileged over womanhood. So it’s easier at first to talk about elevating girls to the level of men. When you start to challenge the patriarchal notion of manhood, you can ruffle men’s feathers. It’s easier to be relaxed about girls becoming scientists, but boys who show feminine traits are still called ‘sissy,’ or ‘queer.’”

But others, like Mortenson and Hoff Sommers, believe that boys are not getting the support they need because American politicians and educators are still, as Hoff Sommers put it, “mired in p.c. concerns” that lead them to discriminate against boys — for being boys.

“Politically, it’s very difficult to get support for boys,” says Mortenson. “I started writing about boys in 1995, and for the first four years, I was widely ignored. It takes an awful long time to changed the mentality that girls are the universal victims of gender discrimination.”

Says Hoff Sommers, “I’ve spoken with members of Congress, and they have told me that they can’t do anything about it until there is a concerned constituency. That is something that has to be created by the media.

“It’s easier to create concern for girls’ issues, because there are so many journalists lending support — Anna Quindlen, Natalie Angier, Katie Couric,” she claims. “The journalists were key players in the movement to empower girls. I think they got carried away and shortchanged boys in the process.”

It is somewhat astonishing to hear that boys can’t get the attention of politicians and journalists, even though the majority of politicians and journalists are men. Perhaps that is part of the problem: It is difficult to convince adults that boys are in a crisis that could affect their educational and economic future when those adults look around and find men in positions of power.

Mortenson acknowledges that “college-educated men get more bang for their buck.” But, he says, not enough men are going to college, and in the current economy, “the only people who make it are the ones who have a college education.”

He also points out that the vast majority of organizations that have the membership base and political clout to lobby on gender issues are women’s organizations, which are a good 30 years ahead of men in organization.

Says Mortenson, “One problem facing boys is that adult men have nowhere near the interest or the organizational structure to support boys on the level that adult women have provided for girls. There are simply no equivalent male organizations.”

It is most often the women at Mortenson’s lectures who express concern about the problems facing boys. “If we ever do anything about the boy crisis,” he says, “women will deal with it, because they will realize that it is in their self-interest to engage boys in education.”

With so many competing theories, it’s impossible to tell exactly what that engagement will look like. The debate about boys’ education mirrors many of the larger debates about American education: Do we need “tougher standards,” mandatory testing, character education and strict discipline? Or do we need smaller classrooms, individual attention and encouragement of creative and critical thinking?

Gender gaps in education — unlike the more pressing and intractable gaps associated with parental involvement, race and class — have proved to be surprisingly bridgeable, at least when it comes to girls. The remarkable progress of girls in academic achievement and higher education over the last 30 years demonstrates that their delays and difficulties were not inevitable. It is fair to assume that boys have the same potential for catching up. What remains to be seen, however, is whether their plight can motivate adults to agree on a plan of action and finally get it off the ground.