Content Warning: This section discusses graphic depictions of sexual violence and rape; derogatory language toward gay, trans, and women characters; violence against children, including sexual violence; self-mutilation; and suicidal ideation.

Irving offers a complex portrait of gender roles and modern marriage as he presents the perception of nontraditional divisions of labor within the home. Garp’s relationship with the second-wave feminist movement evolves as he struggles to reconcile the ideals of radical politics with the actual consequences of political action.

Garp’s conception was enabled by an act of violence that became key to the diegetic feminist movement. Garp pronounces himself a fierce advocate against rape, yet his mother raped his incapacitated, unable-to-consent father. As he encounters parallel acts of violence by and toward women, he struggles to understand if acts of violence committed by women are less severe than those committed toward women. Irving depicts Jenny’s rape of Garp as less violent than the rapes of women, even suggesting that Technical Sergeant Garp enjoyed it because he was physically aroused. Jenny’s acolytes do not view this rape to be as egregious as those committed against women and girls, maintaining that Jenny’s act enabled her to live an independent, asexual life. Garp proclaims himself an advocate for equal rights but constantly wonders if true equality means that women are just as inherently bad as men or if women are due some kind of reparations for historical wrongs, institutionalized sexism, and assumed biological inferiority.