You could say it was just another morning on Howard Stern's radio show. The host was petulantly aroused, and the object of his disaffection was, ahem, a woman. In this case, Amy Lee, lead singer of Evanescence, the most successful new rock act of 2003 and the year's only female-led rock band to have an album go platinum, or even gold (Fallen has sold almost three million copies).

Stern had just seen Lee perform on the Teen Choice Awards broadcast and was disappointed -- but not by her singing. He railed that she didn't look anything like her photos or as she did in the band's video for their goth-rap-metal hit, "Bring Me to Life." During the TV show, she'd worn layers of dark clothes, and Stern was appalled. How dare she hide her body? The band's music must be angry, he surmised, because she's too ugly to get a man!

What's worse, Lee had accused the shock jock of sexism in an interview. "I think his show is shit," she said. "It's all about objectifying women and just treating them like crap. I'm pissed off at the girls that go on the show, too. That's the horrible part of our society, that women think that's how we're supposed to be." So Stern defended his honor, and, by extension, that of all the guys who felt betrayed by Lee's subterfuge. After mentioning that Lee could stand to lose 50 pounds, Stern put it plainly: "I should bang her and put her out of her misery."

Even in an era when women are said to have achieved unprecedented opportunities and feminism is viewed by many as passe dogma, a female-led rock band is still powerfully, strangely threatening. It's hard to imagine Korn's Jonathan Davis or Staind's Aaron Lewis -- rock singers with less-than-fetching mugs -- subjected to the physical critique endured by Lee. They're not expected to be "attractive" before their music is given serious attention. Davis can, literally, wear a gorilla suit and still appear on the cover of a national magazine (see Spin, November 1998).

During the past five years or so, as rap metal roared and nu metal howled, female musicians became an afterthought. Perhaps it was the hostile work environment -- a lingering backlash against the unprecedented surge of women in alternative rock through the early to mid-'90s (PJ Harvey, Bjork, Hole, the Breeders, Alanis Morissette, Liz Phair, Bikini Kill, Tori Amos, Juliana Hatfield, L7, Babes in Toyland, Veruca Salt, et al.). "It's shocking how few leading ladies there have been out there," says Karen O, 25, of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who released their major-label debut this year. "The ratio of male to female is just totally off."

But this year, there was a shift. Angry-dude titans Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit were less dominant, and rock's definition of masculinity had more to do with introspective emotions (Radiohead, Dashboard Confessional, AFI, Thursday) and scruffy, self-aware cool (the Strokes, the White Stripes). Lollapalooza featured two female-led, main-stage rock bands, the Distillers and the Donnas. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Fever to Tell was one of the year's most critically adored records. There were striking albums from Chan Marshall's Cat Power and Pretty Girls Make Graves (with singer Andrea Zollo).

"It's a cycle," says the Distillers' Brody Dalle, 24. "Look at the late '80s with hair metal, then Nirvana coming around, and after that, it was really booming for women. Then, it went back to a version of hair metal, just without the hair. [Laughs] Now, it's coming around again."

Dalle had a gratifying 2003: Coral Fang, her band's third album (their first on a major label), was well received, and a late 2002 tour during which the Distillers opened for No Doubt and Garbage led to a friendship with veteran female rocker Shirley Manson.

But talk to Dalle for even 15 minutes and it's clear that she embodies the conflicted nature of women in rock. She's resentful about having to defend her divorce from Tim Armstrong of Rancid (after she'd had an affair with Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme). She still has to withstand accusations that her early music was ghostwritten by Armstrong. She's on edge about charges that she exploited and abandoned the Bay Area and L.A. punk scenes to set herself up for a major-label deal. And she feels patronized by discussions of women in rock. "[The subject] is moribund, dude," she says derisively. "I think focusing on that alone is what killed women playing music in the '90s."

Dalle was raised in Melbourne, Australia, and her mother held "strong political feminist views. She didn't even genderize colors -- she never put me in pink. I was a tomboy. I'm still a tomboy -- I just wear heels." Dalle also attended Rock'n'Roll High School (formed in 1990 by Stephanie Bourke of alt-rock group Litany), where girls took music lessons, practiced, formed bands, planned gigs, and recorded. Dalle's first group, Sourpuss, flourished there, and she met Armstrong when Rancid stopped by the inner-city Melbourne school. But Dalle has few fond memories, referring to the administrators as "psychotic feminists."

"It's a great idea in theory," says Dalle. "But women have to take the fucking reins themselves. That way it's not some novelty or something you've had handed to you because of your lack of an appendage." When asked if it's hard for young girls to imagine being in a rock band if they haven't seen women doing it, Dalle responds: "My influences were guys, so that's no excuse." Of course, Dalle has said that she learned to play Hole's "Teenage Whore" on guitar at age 13, and she covered Patti Smith's "Ask the Angels" on the Distillers' 2000 debut album.

Most of us rebel against our childhoods in some way, so it's not surprising that Dalle is ambivalent about her progressive upbringing. But it's sad that after benefiting from so many strong women, she feels the need to denigrate their influence in order to get her own talent recognized; still, it's precisely the lack of opportunity and support for women in rock that forces female artists to scramble for crumbs. Despite Dalle's worries, it's rare that women in rock bands are handed anything.

If you picked a random week out of the year and checked for women rockers on the Billboard Top 200 albums, Hot 100 singles, and Modern Rock top 20 albums charts, you would've found Amy Lee, Meg White (of the White Stripes), and Liz Phair. After Evanescence, the top-selling album by a female-led band was the Donnas' Spend the Night, at 363,000 copies. Despite her sexed-up pop makeover, Phair has sold just 197,000 copies of her latest; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, only 88,000. The last albums by Bjork and PJ Harvey didn't come close to going gold.

"When I was younger, I didn't have that many chances to experience women playing rock music," says Karen O. "Most of the women I've admired had to reinvent the genre for themselves." Or as Dalle puts it, "I play music, that's all that fucking matters. I'm still trying to figure all this shit out on my own."