As the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton approaches an unhappy close, the post-mortems from prominent female writers are sounding a consistent alarm. Women may have thought we're living in a post-feminist moment, they say, but public treatment of Mrs. Clinton proves this is not so.

With her candidacy, "the sexism in America, long lying dormant, like some feral, tranquilized animal, yawned and revealed itself," Amanda Fortini wrote recently in New York magazine. "Even those of us who didn't usually concern ourselves with gender-centric matters began to realize that when it comes to women, we are not post-anything."

But is the treatment Mrs. Clinton received evidence of how the American people feel about women and their role in society, or of how we feel about this woman and her role?

Is it evidence of society's "feral" sexism, or is it evidence that we live in feral times?

And if sexism is rampant in the news media, are voters also that shallow?

Hillary had a forerunner. The first viable female candidate for national office was Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984.

The nastiest media moment Ms. Ferraro weathered was snarkiness about the condition of her thighs after she did a photo-op strolling on a beach in a bathing suit. The nastiest personal slam came from the then-vice president's wife, Barbara Bush, whose opinion of her "rhyme[d] with rich." These ugly incidents flared up, then died.

But this was back when the Internet was just a gleam in Al Gore's eye, before the dawn of the endless news cycle and the corrosive force of the blogosphere's unrestrained id.

In a Time magazine piece last summer titled "Beware the Bloggers' Bile," veteran political writer and blogger Joe Klein decried the "fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere."

"Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed," he wrote. But leaning left himself (as he noted), Mr. Klein excused bloggers' bile as "merely aping the odious, disdainful ... tone" of talk radio.

Nice try, Joe. Frustration certainly fueled the rise of right-wing talk radio, but it was justified anger at the well-documented, unfair coverage of conservative politics by the liberal "establishment media." And talk radio's tone, monitored by a federal authority, can't begin to compare to the vile spewing on the Internet's lawless frontier.

It is actually the Internet's anything-goes tone that has infected Old Media, whose worried members must now compete for the attention of an audience that's acquired a taste for blood. Hillary Clinton, the first female candidate in the Internet age, has been the main target of this brave new world's juvenile picking at differentness.

Live by identity politics, die by identity politics. Since slavery was America's original sin, Barack Obama's "ism" -- racism -- easily trumps Mrs. Clinton's issue of sexism. She wasn't anti-war enough to win the left-wing blogosphere's support and has enraged them by refusing to get out of their candidate's way.

Since ardent feminists tend to be left-wing, this is their first taste of the bile that Bush-era conservatives are accustomed to receiving, and it's the first time "their" candidate has not been the media's darling.

Some feminist critics tried early on to force a broad social judgment on Mrs. Clinton's candidacy. "In the end," said Elizabeth Ossoff, a professor of political psychology, in a PG news article 15 months ago, "how Hillary does will depend on how we feel about gender and sexism."

Really? Might it not have a little to do with how we feel about this particular woman? Or what we think of her policies?

I, for one, would have been thrilled by a woman's nomination and honored to oppose this woman for no other reason than her leftist ideals and relative inexperience. Others desperately want a clean break from the Bush-Clinton White House seesaw.

Evidence of media sexism against Mrs. Clinton is basically anecdotal -- this cable news anchor's misogynistic quip, that newspaper headline's skeptical tone -- but evidence of the voters' thinking comes in the more quantifiable form of exit polls.

Beginning with the Pennsylvania primary, when Mr. Obama's pejorative remarks about small-town voters, guns and religion surfaced, Mrs. Clinton received a big surge among blue-collar men. That is, when the candidates' ideas, rather than their superficial identities, came to the fore, men forsook a male candidate to vote for a woman. Though it seems to have come too late, the men's shift gave her candidacy a second wind. It should also give women second thoughts: If the personal truly is political, then how do we prevent the political from being all-too personal?