Behold with me the politics of gynocentrism. What a depressing and desiccative sight it is. Just look at Gloria Steinem.

From once-ripe feminist icon to idea-barren harridan, she offers nothing to young women but anachronistic man-hate, anti-military bigotry and woe-is-me wallowing.

Hope and change? Try harp and whinge. Some things get better with age. The women's rights movement isn't one of them.

In the dark and desperate days of gyno-candidate Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Team Hill dragged Steinem out of the leftist dustbin for a grieve-a-thon in Austin, Texas. The 73-year-old activist sulked about Barack Obama's ascendancy to The New York Observer, blaming voters who "want redemption for racism" and complaining that not "as many want redemption for the gynocide."

What does she mean by gynocide? "There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female," Steinem asserted, making a passing reference to pregnant women killed by male partners. Presumably, she's not including the millions of unborn girls aborted around the world every year because of their gender. (Not exactly the kind of empowerment the fist-raising, bra-burning pro-choicers had in mind.) And nothing in Steinem's record indicates that she's thinking of the untold numbers of girls and women murdered for "honor" in the name of Allah by Muslim relatives.

It's Western men Steinem detests. You know, the ones who watch football, whom the NOW propagandists tried to blame for a mythic rise in domestic violence on Super Bowl Sundays, and the ones who serve in the U.S. armed forces — like that gyno-enemy, John McCain.

As the Observer reported, Steinem launched into a full-scale tirade about McCain's war heroism — peddling a double standard that simply doesn't exist:

"Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight (sic) years.

[The media would ask], 'What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?'"

In fact, nasty anonymous fliers in South Carolina did attack McCain's years in captivity, and liberal websites have spotlighted the grievances, doubts and conspiracy theories of some of McCain's fellow POWs.

But it's not just about John McCain. "Steinem's broader argument was that the media and the political world are too admiring of militarism in all its guises," the Observer helpfully explained.

"I am so grateful that she [Clinton] hasn't been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn't even play war games as a kid," Steinem spewed, later adding that "from George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people."

From Vietnam to Iraq, self-contradictory feminists have always behaved as if serving in the military was about nothing more than "killing people" — even as they clamored to put women on the front lines in combat roles in the name of gender equality. Leave it to the progressive left to smear their sisters after pushing for decades to integrate them into the "war machine." They don't care about the accomplished careers of women in the armed services. They care about haranguing Congress on government funding for their favorite contraceptive pills and abortions, portraying female soldiers as victims, hounding military recruiters, and exploiting accusations of harassment and abuse to undermine military institutions.

American women are the freest, wealthiest, most educated in the world. They are liberated enough to choose someone for president other than a female candidate out of uterus-based loyalty. This should be viewed as progress, not heresy. But the old-guard feminists — the "ruling people" — deeply resent this independence as they cling to what's left of their power base and their shrinking absolute moral authority card.

Like their increasingly whiny candidate Clinton, Gloria Steinem and the fading gyno-saurs just can't accept when it's time to quit.

Michelle Malkin is author of "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild." Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

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