We're looking at our particularity, the same way the women's movement, civil rights, the gay liberation movement, looked at theirs. When the American Association of University Women produced ''How Schools Shortchange Girls'' in 1992, schools began training teachers to give girls the attention they weren't getting and lift their math and science skills to the level of boys. With a report a year later about sexual harassment in schools, they focused on making hallways less hostile. But now more recent research suggests that boys fall farther behind girls in reading and writing than girls do in math and science. The Wonder of Boys'' notes how boys are twice as likely as girls to take Ritalin or be in special classes for bad behavior.
Girls earn more A's, boys drop out of high school more often.
Pollack's upcoming ''Real Boys, '' based on research at the private Belmont Hill School, notes that boys are less likely to attend college. And Carol Gilligan, the Harvard professor whose research gave voice to young girls in the '80s, now lectures on the emotional problems of boys in elementary school, and heads a research project on boys. But those involved also note a conservative, even reactionary, shift in men's organizations. The line between men's studies and men's rights blurs more and more. Warren Farrell, whom Gloria Steinem praised when he wrote ''The Liberated Man'' in 1975, has now become the sage of the men's rights movement with books like ''The Myth of Male Power,'' written after his conversion to the belief that as feminism has liberated women it has oppressed men.