Hollywood and the Borrowed Moment

Hollywood has a consistent pattern: women are allowed access to power, but their residency in it is carefully managed. They can visit. They cannot live there.

The tell is duration. In the 2023 Super Mario Bros. film, Peach grows to twice her size to extract information from an enemy — a moment of undeniable physical power that lasts exactly as long as the problem requires, then stops. Mario’s Super Mushroom, by contrast, is an experience — the camera lingers, he explores it, the audience lives in it with him. One is a tool. The other is an identity.

The Wasp in the MCU is a more damning case. She has the more advanced suit. The in-universe logic actively supports her being the one to grow larger, more often, more effectively. And yet: her giant form appears once, in animated What If… — one episode, one minute, non-canonical. In the main theatrical films, Ant-Man grows repeatedly while she does not. This is not accident or oversight. Someone kept making that call.

Witnessing vs. Dwelling

The distinction is witnessing versus dwelling. A man who watches a woman be powerful for 90 seconds can file it under “badass moment” and walk out unchanged. A man who lives in that reality for 15 minutes — where the world orients around her, where he has to look up, where her presence is simply the weather — that does something to him. It reorganizes something.

Studios are managing, consciously or not, against that reorganization.

This is why even films that give women genuine competence and agency still find ways to rebalance: the giant form is functional, instrumental, limited. It solves the problem and exits. It does not become her world.

The Monstrous Feminine at the Root

This is not a modern discomfort alone. Cultures have been shrinking the same archetype for millennia — the devouring mother, the terrible goddess, the woman who takes up too much space. You do not work that hard to suppress something you do not fear. The giant woman is Danu. Brighid at full flame. The sovereignty goddess before her edges were filed down.

Hollywood inherited that anxiety without understanding where it came from.

The irony: what studios are carefully managing audiences away from — sustained residence in the presence of a woman’s full power — is not threatening to everyone. For some people, it is not disorienting. It is home.

See also: The Four Ancient Fears of Female Sovereignty, Matrifocal Masculinity — Centering the Vulnerable, Power-With vs. Power-Over, Longing as Sacred Pulse