It's not about gender. It's about short memory.

Charlie Sheen may be a pretty awful human being based on his past behavior, but people don't remember that shit. No one's thinking about the domestic abuse charges. What's in front of everyone is a guy who bucked authority (drug use that didn't seem to affect his work, nasty comments about his boss) and, when asked to apologize, essentially held two middle fingers up in the air like Eminem (another talented but vicious person whose contempt for authority and convention have given him "folk hero" status.)

Besides, look at it this way: the guy does all kinds of depraved shit and remains the highest-paid TV actor. Nothing happens to him in spite of his awful behavior. He's an asshole, but he's consistently been an asshole for years. Then, he makes a jab at his boss (a sneeze compared to, for example, physically attacking a woman) and ends up in professional hot water. Of course this turn of events is going to make him a hero, even if he doesn't deserve it.

(Note: I didn't take his comment to be anti-Semitic; he wanted to argue that Lorre's real name was radically different from his Hollywood name, thus attempting to establish him as a fake, because in 2011 no one is going to think less of someone for having a Jewish name. It wasn't "hey look, this guy is a Jew" but "hey look, this guy is hiding his own name". Silly and petty, not to mention hypocritical, on Sheen's part, but not anti-Semitic.)

People focus on the last behavior, the one that led to the current situation, and ignore the others. Since the action that got his show canceled was telling authority to suck a bag of dicks-- a behavior that the world, objectively, needs a lot more of-- Sheen is being lionized even though the reality is that he isn't some righteous crusader against the smug arrogance of authority, but just a childish asshole.

The problem is that both heroes and assholes hate authority-- for different reasons but with equal passion-- and assholes who end up in epic struggles against it are often perceived as heroes.