Brilliant movie moment of the past week: the credits to Edward Dmytryk's "The Carpetbaggers" (1964), broadcast by AMC cable channel. We are admiring a dazzling, Technicolor blue sky when suddenly, rocketing like warplanes out of a bank of wispy clouds, flies name after name in sizzling neon-red, the letters hugely expanding and separating as they whiz past our heads. Behind it all is Elmer Bernstein's brassy, blaring score, all jazz trumpets and popping bongo drums -- befitting the raw Harold Robbins bestseller on which the movie is based. Damn, I wish I'd seen that in a theater.

Lifetime cable channel deserves huge praise for last week's "Intimate Portrait" profile of Indira Gandhi, the first woman prime minister of India. The archival footage of the awkward young Indira and the description and documentation of her early family conflicts and steely rise to power were superb, although the coverage of her later years and of the rivalry between her ill-fated sons was rushed and patchy.

However, Lifetime's profile of Gloria Steinem the night before was a disaster -- a scandalous piece of propaganda obviously engineered by Steinem and her girlishly squeaky-voiced friends to whitewash her career after a decade of slippage in her reputation. Steinem was hailed as a "major figure of the 20th century" by a chum apparently unaware that Steinem is virtually unknown outside the United States and has had no impact on world feminism. If any American feminist is that major figure, it would be Betty Friedan -- whom the program shockingly left unmentioned.

The program ostentatiously drafted and foregrounded every African-American in Steinem's circle to recast her as the Mother Teresa of racial politics -- in order to divert attention, apparently, from the fact that in the 1960s the once-brunette Steinem was a man-hungry party gal in a see-through plastic dress who played the blond card to the max in socialite Manhattan (a fact that Friedan herself famously commented on).

An ex-boyfriend proclaimed on camera that all criticism of Steinem, particularly by radical lesbian feminists who mysteriously indicted her in the 1970s as a false leader and media hound, was based on "jealousy" by "ugly" women who resented Steinem's beauty, intellect and "literary" mastery (loud guffaw from me here -- Steinem's sense of literature is earnest Soviet Realist).

As someone who was viciously attacked by Steinem and her cohorts in the feminist establishment (Steinem said of me in 1992, for example, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic"), I actually enjoyed this program for what it inadvertently revealed about the pathology of Steinem's unstable childhood, when she was abandoned with a mentally ill mother and bitten in bed by a rat.

There's a direct connection here to Steinem's adult pose as serene Madonna of the Nations: Her honeyed speech patterns are tense with repressed aggression and, like her wavy, Ali Baba hand gestures, are a technique of seduction to bring starry-eyed women under her spell. Steinem is a cultist, using good works for mind control.

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s. But that movement was merely a symptom or corollary of a profound transformation in American society after World War II. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Popular culture -- above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R&B roots -- did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader. The forceful, dynamic women who were my fellow college students at the State University of New York at Binghamton (1964-68) were untouched by feminism. My own brand of Amazon feminism predated Friedan (I've written elsewhere about my Amelia Earhart research project, which began in Syracuse in 1961 and was reported on by the local newspaper).

An honest profile of Gloria Steinem, who in the 1970s and '80s closed Ms. magazine to pro-sex feminists like myself, would examine her role in helping create the present unholy marriage of Democratic activism with celebrity cash and flash. She is at the center of a sanctimonious, genteel feminism that operates by clique and thinks that good intentions trump sleazy means. Steinem's spiritual stepsister is Hillary Clinton.

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