Fifteen-year-old "women" brag, I'm told, about how many men they can "shift" in one night. "Shifting" doesn't mean what it did 10 years ago. Oral sex and even full sexual intercourse now have the same meaning as French kissing did 15 years go. Mothers talk, in shocked tones, about girls going to discos without knickers for the purposes of sexual play. I've heard south Dublin mothers ranking girls' schools on how uninhibited, to put it politely, the girls are. The mothers base their knowledge on what their daughters have told them. When I visited a disco for private secondary school students in Dublin, I saw many tough, confident, young women in the mood for sexual provocation. The young men, in general, seemed less mature and had a lost quality. I could understand why so many of them seemed determined to get drunk. Inside the disco, teenagers were engaging in heavy sexual foreplay; nobody overtly watched, but there was an element of public performance involved. I witnessed other scenes in an adult pub in Dublin where couples performed sex acts on each other. Here the activity was more extreme, but it was the same idea - sex as performance art. When I heard recently that a teenage boy had visited a hospital consultant because he was concerned about his sexual performance, I wasn't surprised. Some young women have begun to objectify and rank men in the same way that women have been objectified by men. Young women, too, worry about their sexual abilities. The current preoccupation with breast size in teen idols and ordinary teenagers alike illustrates the point. Obsession with appearance is part of the objectification process. Parents are talking about not just how young women are growing increasingly predatory sexually, but also about how cruel they can be. The mothers of teenage sons talk about how vulnerable their "boys" are to being emotionally manipulated by young women who appear to be heartless. Young men hurt women too, of course. Often because they are as confused as young women are about boundaries around sexual behaviour. But when certain pubs have backrooms where teenagers retreat for a few minutes of anonymous, consensual sex, you cannot blame the men. Women are as responsible as men are for an atmosphere in which romance is dead, long live sexual conquest. A few readers sent me critical letters and Mass cards recently when I expressed the view that teenagers need to understand the difference between procreational and recreational sex if they are to begin to use contraceptives responsibly. By recreational sex, I didn't mean sex without intimacy and some degree of commitment, or at least enough discussion and negotiation so that nobody gets hurt. Not that it matters what I say: sex without commitment or intimacy is the kind of sex that many teenagers are having. And they are having it because that is the kind of society we have created for them. The TV programme The Villa is typical of current sexual mores. Put six strangers together in a Spanish hacienda, three men and three women, and see what happens. When they end up in bed together, film them. The typical conservative reaction is to ask, how can young women think so little of themselves that they allow themselves to be "used" for sex? In reality, it's often the young women who think so little of the men. It's as likely to be the women who are the users. In The Villa, the women speak much more rudely of the men than the other way around.

This is not to say that women are tramps who ask for it, and that the reason increasing numbers of young women are being sexually assaulted is that they cannot keep their knickers on. Nor am I being sensationalistic. The majority of teenagers are not behaving like sexual predators, but they see predatory behaviour all around them and I know that many are upset and even frightened by it. The obvious question is: what messages have we been giving girls, not just that they have so little respect for themselves but that they have so little respect for men? When a young single mother tells me that men are so "useless" that women are better off raising families on their own, I know she's learned this from her mother, and maybe her grandmother too. The father of the child may have behaved in "useless" fashion, but did anyone give him a chance when the anti-male cards were stacked against him? When a female friend said, a few months ago, "I LIKE men", the words were a bit of a shock. I grew up in a feminist climate in the 1970s and early 1980s when women were not supposed to "like" men. Men were the enemy. They were people to be negotiated with until a truce could be called. The legacy of this is a kind of institutionalised men-hating. Get almost any group of female friends together for a few drinks and they'll start trashing men. Our daughters hear this, even if it's only in subtle ways. Your average intelligent young man is now so politically correct that he doesn't dare speak about women in a disrespectful way - at least not in front of women. Many women, on the other hand, seem to have absolutely no restraint when it comes to putting men down sexually to their faces. I wonder if young women believe that they are merely treating men the way men have always treated women. Are they doing men one better, by hurting before they themselves can be hurt? Do they think they are "acting like men", just as we expect women to "act like men" in the workplace?

It could be that by devaluing "feminine" qualities of nurturing and caring (qualities which men share too), we are telling girls that they should be as aggressive in sexual matters as they need to be in other areas of life. I don't know what the answer is. But I do know that a lot of teenagers - male and female - are getting hurt by sexual experiences which, in an ideal world, should be life-enhancing.