Bitch Planet #3 Review

Kelly Sue DeConnick’s amazing exploration of gender, Bitch Planet, has used a science-fiction plot (women who fail the patriarchy’s expectations are deemed “noncompliant” and sent to a space prison everyone calls “Bitch Planet”) to engage and challenge the reader, then followed each chapter with insightful essays and painful but funny satires. Last issue, the writer explained that in order to tell her story, every third issue is going to be a character-focused interlude, and this week, we get to know the enormous, bombastic Penny Rolle, a brawler who has stolen every scene she’s had in this series.

The setup for the interlude involves representatives of the patriarchy asking Penny why she isn’t ashamed to be so big and angry, allowing for a series of flashbacks that perfectly incorporate the concept of body image into the rich discussion of gender that this book has begun. In the first issue, the story and back matter introduced basic feminist ideas to the comic format, and in the second, DeConnick and company explained that applying this discussion to the limited subset of white, heterosexual, cisgendered women was a mistake. This issue focuses on the way that women use weight and eating patterns to shame each other into following the impossible ideals. For a particularly cutting example, Penny is praised for her baking by a man who buys two muffins from her, then referred to by him with, “Who wants to come home to that?” The next in line is a woman who orders “one sugar-free, salt-free, gluten-free muffin” with three plates so her friends can enjoy fifteen calories as they compare the body parts they hate. It’s not the first time we’ve seen jokes like this, but it comes as a shock when it’s played for pathos instead of laughs. Similarly shocking is the way Penny sums up her experience with the world: “Why folks gotta say what I am? Ain’t it enough to know who I am?” We’re not losing character or story for the purpose of feeding the gender discussion; DeConnick is writing a compelling book with rich characters and a detailed sci-fi background. But she’s making it clear that it is shameful to treat this as a piece of pure entertainment.

As with the last two issues, a feminist article follows the story in a feature called “Bitches Be Like…” This month, Megan Carpentier takes the familiar idea that women feel pressure to eat and look a certain way, and she enriches that by following it to the conclusion that women do this so that they can stay in relationships with people who only love the fake versions of themselves that they have been showing. She looks at the decisions she made as Megan and compares them to the decisions she made as Mike’s girlfriend and finds a significant divide. It’s gentle but firm, acknowledging that it’s hard to change patterns but also stating that it’s important. Penny represented women of size and attitude in this month’s story; Carpentier generalizes this to all women. This essay is chased with satirical ads including a command to “stop being so fat and gross you big fatty!” by ordering a tapeworm that will take off “your balance! your energy! your joie de vivre! your will to live!” then referencing that over 15,000 American women were murdered by intimate partners between 2002 and 2012. This book knows how to make the readers laugh, but it never loses the meaning behind the joke.

This book has put out three issues, and each was amazing, and each had something important to say, and each made me laugh. It feels like the introduction to sociology of gender roles I took in college. It should be taught in college. It should be taught in high school. It should be worked into the way we talk to children of all genders about how we treat each other. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Next: Previously ... our Bitch Planet #2 review

More from Bam Smack Pow

Home/Comics