As I first began reading Girls, my first impression was: wow, this is incredibly weird.  I am an avid comic and graphic novel reader, yet even for me I found giant man-killing sperm to be a little odd.  Nevertheless, as I continued to read, I kept thinking that all the sexism and hatred towards women that I was seeing must have a purpose, that the Luna Brothers must have some sort of point they are getting to that they’ll eventually explain.  Yet when I finished the comics, I was stumped.  No reasons, no explanation.  Nothing.  I saw that Girls had a clear,  main theme of misogyny, but I kept thinking to myself, this can’t be right.  The Luna Brothers aren’t condoning sexism here.  So what is it?  And then I realized; Girls presents us with the stereotypes of women in society.  We see how men think of and treat women, and even how women treat each other in ways that only deepen the gender gap.

In our society, we tend to think of women as belonging to a specific type, and Girls brings out all of these.

• The McCallister’s daughter: the cocktease – She so clearly appears to offer sexual promises, but in the end, she doesn’t do anything at all, and is furious you thought so.
• Alexis: the easy girl – she’ll sleep with anyone for no reason, but she’ll still slap you for identifying her as overly promiscuous
• Taylor: the emotional ex-girlfriend – her reasoning makes no sense, she deals with everything in life through her emotions and not reason, she assumes you know the inner workings of her mind and becomes furious when you don’t.
• Nancy: the emasculator – nothing gives her greater pleasure than emasculating men, particularly in public.   She is also a control freak and extremely outspoken on all matters
• Ying-Ma: the gold-digger – similar to Nancy, she is a control freak, constantly nags her husband (to the extreme, in this case), and constantly uses the money her husband worked for to shop for things for herself
• Ruby: the nuclear housewife – she stays at home, cleans, cooks, and cares for you and the children without a word of complaint.  Considered to be “the perfect woman.”  However, on occasion she will eventually disobey, and leave you.
• The “Girls” – the Girls are a little more all-encompassing and fall under the extremely old stereotype that women are innately lustful creatures that seek only to drag men down into sin with them.

With all of these stereotypes, we see one clear theme connecting them all – that men are the victims.  In Girls, for the most part, very little happens that can be directly blamed on men.  Even the creation of the eggs, can be blamed not on the men who had sex with the Girls, but on the aliens themselves, who tempted the men with the forbidden fruit of their flesh.  The alien Girls are not the only bad guys, the women of Pennystown as well.   Through their comics, the Luna Brothers expose the way men view women in society through the character Ethan.  In the first few pages of the comic, he declares his hatred for all women and identifies the Pennystown women as the stereotypes I listed above – a clear indicator of how the rest of story will play out.

In their comics, the Luna Brothers identify sex as a central theme surrounding the treatment of women in society.  For example, consider how the Girls remain naked throughout the entire comic and how they are not able to truly speak.  The Girls represent not only sex as a sinful temptation, but as an act required of all women.  Both Ethan and Lester have sex with the Girls because they have been denied it by the women in their lives (man as woman’s victim), and they see no problem with having sex with the Girls because it is something women should automatically give to men.  This is often the reasoning behind the pettier forms of sexual harassment (groping, pinching, catcalls, etc.) to full-on rape.  The nudity of the Girls represents the sexuality required from them, while their lack of speech is their inability to protest – the silence of so many victims of sexual assault.

The Luna Brothers also touch upon how women treat other women in society.  Even though the norm of modern society is that sex is much more acceptable, women often resort to insults of promiscuity when directing their anger towards other women.  For a women to be seen as a “whore” is for her to lose all respect and standing in society.  Notice how although Nancy sees the creation of eggs as solely the fault of men who think with what’s between their legs and not their brains, the first insults she comes up with when speaking of the Girls are “whore” and “slut.”  Through this, she seeks to decrease their standing and thus the ability of the townspeople to allot them any rights.  A woman labeled a “whore” can be treated horribly, and no one will protest it, because they believe she deserves it for her supposedly sinful behavior.

Overall, I found Girls to be an incredibly brilliant piece.  While I wasn’t a fan of the ending, its structure, plot, and graphics cleverly identified and analyzed sexism in society.  The Luna Brothers used both text and art to examine sex as a key factor the manner in which women are viewed and treated, and also exposed how women are not always the victims, but culprits themselves, of sexism.

So, what do you think?  Is Girls a misogynist piece?  Or a commentary on sexism?

~Samantha Faso