OP-ED — WPS NEWS

By Jericho Jake Slade
December 5, 2025 — 9:00 a.m.

If you’ve been paying attention to Stranger Things — and let’s be honest, the world has — you may have noticed something odd about the young women in the cast. And no, I don’t mean a plot twist or an Upside-Down monster lurking in the background. I mean the uncanny way the franchise seems hell-bent on freezing its actresses at a permanent age of about sixteen, no matter how many years pass, no matter how many birthdays they’ve had, and no matter how obviously adult they’ve become.

Hollywood has always had a hard time letting women grow up, but the Stranger Things machine has taken it to an almost surreal level. These actresses are in their twenties now. They’re adults, professionals, and capable of showing up on a red carpet looking like grown women. Yet every time the show rolls out its promotional cycles, the styling clamps back down like a chastity belt from 1873. Necklines rise, silhouettes flatten, and anything resembling a curve gets treated like a breach of contract.

And for what?
To maintain the illusion that the characters — and, apparently, the women playing them — must remain suspended in adolescent amber. It’s branding as a form of infantilization. A corporate image that demands stunted womanhood as the price of continuity.

Compare that to Jenna Ortega, a performer in the same age bracket, playing another teen character. Ortega walks onto a red carpet as a fully grown woman, and the world doesn’t collapse. Wednesday audiences don’t riot. Tim Burton doesn’t call a press conference to reassure America that a 20-something playing a teenager is some sort of cosmic disruption. The distinction is simple: Ortega is treated as an adult playing a teen. Stranger Things presents its actresses as teens who just haven’t finished playing at being alive yet.

The uncomfortable truth is that Stranger Things isn’t guarding childhood. It’s guarding a brand. And in doing so, it treats femininity as something dangerous — something that must be hidden, smoothed, erased, or rationed out only when a male character’s emotional arc requires it. The moment romance shows up, curves magically reappear, as if womanhood is only acceptable when it’s in service to a boy’s storyline.

That’s not a moral stance.
That’s not sensitivity.
It’s cowardice baked in mascara and wardrobe fittings.

Hollywood’s history with women is long and ugly, and Stranger Things has wandered right into the same ditch Mike Royko used to roast when he wrote about fashions that made women look like they were trying to escape from their own lives. The Duffers’ version of restraint isn’t chivalry — it’s insecurity masquerading as nostalgia.

Let the women look like women.
Let the actresses age like the rest of us.
And let the franchise keep its hands off the idea that femininity is some kind of contaminant.

The world isn’t ending if a grown woman looks like a grown woman — even in Hawkins.

APA Citations

American Psychological Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). (For definitions of ephebophilia/hebephilia referenced conceptually.)


Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. (Foundational reference for film theory on the objectification/infantilization of women.)

Feature Image is AI generated image of typical teenager girls in LA in the 1980s.

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