It's the wedding scene in Friends. Ross's bride Emily is seething after his "Rachel" slip at the altar and hisses as they walk back down the aisle. Once out of sight of the wedding party, she lets fly with a vicious punch to his stomach.

Cue canned laughter. One 11year-old girl, re-telling this scene, laughs out loud. But would we - or she, a budding feminist like most of the other girls in her single-sex school - think it funny if the scene was reversed?

Not likely. Whether or not you think feminism has succeeded in winning equality for women, most of us would agree that it has made violence against women no laughing matter. Ditsy-if-loveable heroines like the star of I Love Lucy are pretty much out of fashion in the PC Nineties; but it's okay to laugh at Homer Simpson, the dumbest dad of the decade. In short, it's pretty much okay to talk about men the way they used to talk about women - dismissively.

At the same time, girl power is on the rise, and it's a brave man or boy who will try to put the modern girl down; whether her heroine is Mary McAleese or Sporty Spice, it's usually someone feisty and fearless who doesn't take crap from anyone.

What's most striking about our feminist daughters is their confidence in their place in the world. Some may not like the "F" word, but most girls nowadays seem to be feminist through and through. In some single-sex girls schools, it seems as if they're drinking it in through the water supply.

Most parents will celebrate this. But is it possible that girl power has gone too far? That it really is time for old feminists (like myself) to listen harder to the rising volume of complaints from aggrieved men - and perhaps to temper the tone of triumphalism in girls' voices by reminding them that boys (and men) bleed too.

It doesn't come naturally to a lot of women to be sympathetic to complaints by men that they're being victimised. A lot of it sounds like the kind of whinge you hear from hardline unionists, stranded by history and wondering why the once-oppressed aren't more sympathetic to their cause. But just as most nationalists north and south now acknowledge that they must give the unionist tradition the respect they demand for themselves, so women must listen to what men are complaining about.

Feminism is all about respect, anyway, says Noreen Byrne, chairwoman of the National Women's Council - about building a society "where everyone respects each other". But she doesn't believe, she says, we've reached a stage where girls have to be taught that now the struggle has switched to men's rights.

"The fact is, women are still not treated equally to men, we haven't remotely reached the stage where women are above men. We don't have equal pay, for example; the average industrial wage for women is still below that of men's. Individual boys and men can feel oppressed because girls and women are so confident. But the debate shouldn't get polarised in terms of personal relationships. The truth is that many girls will experience this inequality when they grow up."

She disputes recent claims that men are equally victims of domestic violence as women. "I'm sure there are some women who attack their partners, but research shows that nearly 20 per cent of women here have experienced violence from men in their relationships." She agrees, however, there is discrimination against single fathers - and says it's a wrong men and women should come together to fight against.

If there is a message to convey to children, she says, it is to tell boys that when girls and women complain about inequality, it doesn't mean they're complaining individually about men. And girls should be told to respect boys as boys should be told to respect girls - it's what feminism is all about.

PARENTS MAY NOT need to worry about getting this message across - at least to girls. Although many of us are only dimly aware of it, programmes on gender and equality issues which have been used in girls schools here for the best part of two decades have increasingly promoted the need for respect and understanding between the sexes.

Dr Anne Lodge of UCD's Equality Studies Centre explains that thinking has moved a long way from the days when it was just a question of encouraging girls to do more maths so they could break into traditionally male occupations and fit in to the male-run world. "Now the concentration is on the equality agenda, on educating members of both sexes to respect each other."

It is interesting that the main problem facing the designers of the ground-breaking "Exploring Masculinity" programme featured in EDUCATION & LVING last week was finding single-sex boys schools willing to pilot it. Maureen Bohan, senior psychologist in the Department of Education, explained in that article that the programme - aimed at examining the changing role of men in society - was devised because it was evident that "we were only tackling half the problem" by running such programmes only in girls schools. Many boys schools, it seems, generally didn't want anything to do with it, believing men already had equality.

Now 30 boys schools are running the programme, and all this awareness-raising for boys and girls can only be a good thing. More interesting information about how boys and girls think about equality issues will come out when UCD's Equality Studies Centre publishes its report on Equality and the Social Climate of Schools, initiated by Dr Kathleen Lynch, the centre's co-ordinator.

In the meantime - whatever's in that water, tell the girls to keep on drinking it.