President Clinton, as everyone knows, is hardly a naif about the ways of women. But yet, he met more than his match in the form of 21-year old intern Monica Lewinsky, whose ambition and audacity he critically underestimated. A few months before their relationship became public, a puzzled Clinton even admitted to her, "If I had known what kind of a person you really were, I wouldn't have gotten involved with you."

But the knowledge that Clinton was more fundamentally lacking was insight into Lewinksy's generation. Most critically, Clinton, failed to understand today's young women. To explain Monica Lewinsky, one has to explain Lewinsky's demographic group, which plays by a different set of sexual rules. Lewinsky is part of a new breed of women, born during and shaped by the fomenting sexual revolution and women's movement.

Sharing more of men's power, sense of entitlement and social clout, members of this generation generally feel more comfortable than past generations in aggressively and unapologetically pursuing their own interests in sexual relationships.

The Starr Report revealed as much about Lewinsky's generation as about her own character. One of its most gripping revelations was that Lewinsky was no victimized schoolgirl. She was brazen, relentless and self-centered in her quest for sex and power; in other words, her behavior was like that which is most associated with men.

The report revealed that she even initiated the affair, as well as many of the "sexual encounters" between her and the president. When Clinton tried to break off their relationship, she did not go gently into that good night. The upwardly nubile intern threatened Clinton to secure her a job--a powerful and lucrative one--"not (as) someone's administrative/executive assistant," but one with a salary that "can provide me a comfortable living in New York." Like men are known to do, she bragged about her conquest to at least 10 friends.

Lewinsky, raised in the 1980s, acted much differently than a 21-year-old Capri-clad contemporary of Clinton's would have acted. From early in their lives, today's young women feel entitled to conduct their sex lives on their own terms. Without access to quality information on female sexual desire, sexual health and abortion, women of Clinton's generation were mired in sexual ignorance during the first part of their lives. And when the sexual revolution emerged in the late 1960s, Baby Boomer women, still lacking men's power and status, weren't yet "liberated."

Women of Clinton's generation didn't yet have the education and career clout to become players in the game. The sexual revolution dictated that women become sexually free by passively following men's orders and making their bodies unconditionally accessible.

In the last 20 years, young American women have undergone a more swift and dramatic sexual evolution than any Darwin observed in the Galapagos Islands.

A major, but little-known, finding of the sweeping 1994 University of Chicago National Health and Social Life Survey is that young women account for the greatest sexual changes in the American population. Like men, young women exhibit unpredictable patterns of sexual experimentation: cohabiting and breaking up with many sexual partners. While the average age of sexual initiation for girls has traditionally been several years behind that of boys, the youngest generation surveyed (born in the late 1960s and early 1970s) started at the same age, 17.5 years old. Social scientists also note a general shift by young women to follow male values, which shape what they do sexually. This was the major finding of the UCLA report, "The American Freshman: Thirty-Year Trends," a summary of attitudes from 1966 to 1996. The authors noted "a gender convergence" in values--with women's and men's educational and career aspirations being nearly identical. A University of Michigan researcher Jean Twenge noted in a 1997 article in the journal Sex Roles that women are adapting more "male" values, such as assertiveness and independence. She explained these attitudes partially as the result of women's career goals, which demand more traditional male standards of behavior for getting ahead.

Other researchers note specific sexual attitude shifts. Author Nancy Friday, who has chronicled young women's sexual fantasies for several decades, refers to 20-somethings as "a new race of women" in her book "Women on Top" (1991). Unlike the women she interviewed for "My Secret Garden" (1973), young women of the '90s were not weighed down by guilt about their sexual fantasies and discussed them with relish.

My metaphor for this new breed of women, for better or for worse, is the term "superrat." The unromantic "rat" label is appropriate to indicate that today's women are widely considered noisome and disruptive, often condemned as pests or social menaces. Tension is a constant, reflecting the gaps between their expectations and those of society. The "super" prefix means they are here to stay, and characterizes future generations of women. A great number are protected by their imperviousness to excessive shame and self-blame, a time-honored combination that kept previous generations of "rats" under a more strict and firm yoke.

In her quest for power and in her brazen threats, Lewinsky may represent the dark side of this superrat evolution. But history might view others of her generation more positively. Other young women of her generation, sharing her strong sense of sexual entitlement and thirst for power, have made headlines as forging new rights for women. Demanding higher standards of treatment, women like Lt. Paula Coughlin, who exposed assaults at the Navy's Tailhook Association convention, have fought sexual harassment. Others, such as Patricia Bowman, who challenged William Kennedy Smith, and Desiree Washington, who confronted Mike Tyson, are not afraid to show their faces when addressing the once-stigmatized acquaintance rape issue. Young lesbians, such as Candace Gingrich and Ellen DeGeneres, have demonstrated a new generation's defiance of the closet. Following the lead of Shannon Faulkner, new classes of brave and resilient women are entering the Citadel and other military academies, the last strongholds of male power.

Lewinsky and other "superrats" represent a major shift by women to act more like men. These changes create new sexual choices for women. But, when considering what is yet to come, becoming like men was the easy part. After all, what is traditionally male is most valued in our society; what is traditionally female is still viewed as weak and inferior. While making some important strides, women have not yet overturned traditional male definitions of sexual freedom (e.g., look out only for yourself).

But, love them or fear them, "superrats" are here to stay. They are changing the rules of sex and relationships. They provide powerful testimony that, despite some longings to the contrary, the sexual revolution indeed did happen -- and a new breed of women is its greatest legacy.