Considering the dazzling variety of phallic women in film, the Gabbards point out that, more than dealing with the masculine fear that the woman does not possess the phallus, phallic women also portray the power to cross over gender boundaries.

They show the ways in which women in the films Sea of Love and Working Girl function as a fetish, both denying and confirming that women are castrated. They view the phenomenon of cross-dressing and ambiguous gender as touching on the anxiety over genital differences. The Gabbards conclude that there are any number of ways to understand female power that are not phallocentric, and that do not necessarily involve the crossing of gender boundaries.