We were disturbed a couple of months ago when not a single film directed by a woman made the AFI’s list of the Top 100 Movies of All-Time. Thankfully, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists came to the rescue with their own, alternative list that features women more prominently.

Christy Lemire of the Associated Press, however, reports that the institutional bias reflected in the AFI list is very much a reality in Hollywood, even though female directors are “flooding today’s theaters more than ever.”

On one level, Lemire’s article is a depressing one, as it reflects on dismal statistics and first-hand accounts that reveal how sexism persists in all aspects of the movie business.

Julie Delpy directing “2 Days in Paris”

But as Lemire discusses all the new female-directed films set to be released — from Julie Delpy’s “2 Days in Paris” to Shari Springer Berman’s “The Nanny Diaries” to Robin Swicord’s “The Jane Austen Book Club” — hope springs.

And even though someone like Delpy is sick of only getting requests to direct romantic comedies, her strength and humor makes you feel she’s in this struggle for the long-term:

They’re looking for a female director, and it’s all about a relationship. You know what? I don’t want to make a movie that they want a female director for. To me, first of all, it’s condescending. What does that mean? Is it about breast feeding?

Moving from women in power to women in distress in Hollywood, we shared Naomi Wolf’s concern last month that American culture is continuing its lifelong obsession with women who were “falling apart.” Focusing on the celebrated downfalls of Lindsay Lohan and others, Wolf argues, is an American tradition that persists, even as women are succeeding in the public sphere as never before.

With this attitude in mind, it was interesting to see Paul Harris in the Guardian anoint the new “Bad Girls of Hollywood” as the modern-day replacements for the Rat Pack and other, more recent “Bad Boys,” from Rob Lowe to Robert Downey, Jr.

Unfortunately, his search for a reason for this gender reversal comes up short:

The trend has sociologists and fame-watchers alike wondering what is going on. One possible explanation is that the rise of the Bad Girls is simply a reflection of the generally increasing power and visibility of women in all fields of entertainment. Women have started playing roles in movies usually associated with men (such as action stars). On US television the number of programmes based around strong female roles has jumped massively. Perhaps it is no surprise that some women are also following the paths blazed by the more notorious past male stars and behaving badly too.

At the same time, women behaving badly has a novelty factor that attracts massive media coverage. ‘We have had years of young male stars running amok. It is now so much more fun for the public to see beautiful young women being hauled off to jail,’ said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, New York state. [...]

At the same time there is a wider social acceptance of bad behaviour by young American girls. America is caught in the age of Girls Gone Wild videos which would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. The videos, sold by mail order, normally feature a camera crew searching for girls at parties who are willing to expose their buttocks or breasts and sometimes perform sex acts.

The nation has confronted the same social angst over young women binge drinking as Britain. As a result, the antics of Lohan and Spears may just reflect the behaviour patterns of wider US society.

Rather than seeing this behavior as normal for women in Hollywood, however, we should ask, as Wolf does, what fuels the cultural fascination with that behavior. If American culture has “so much more fun” seeing “beautiful women being hauled off to jail,” it’s no wonder female directors must struggle for respect.