Atwood's portrayal of Oryx

Introduction

Margaret Atwood's new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-Likely-to-be-true, that 'readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.

However, the narrator of Atwood's Riveting novel calls herself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bed sheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigeons and wolves ravage the plebe lands, where ordinary people once lived and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As she tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster. However, he explores the answers to These questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome , where the Paradise Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her ??customary sharp wit and dark humor, Atwood projects us into an Outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.

Discussion

Recent research has begun to distinguish between sexual offenders who only view Internet mediated child pornography and do not engage in any other sexually deviant behaviors from those who do. Opinions related to the viewing of child pornography may differ from opinions about other child pornography crimes that involve sexual contact with or solicitation of a minor. This is the first study to attempt to provide a better understanding of how society perceives this subset of Internet sexual offenders who are considered non-contact offenders (Baumrind, 1991, 95).

There are many possible frameworks from which to conceptualize societal beliefs about the viewing of Internet mediated child pornography. It is likely that beliefs about these crimes bring up core beliefs of members of society learned early in life about sexuality and the innocence of children making child pornography crimes controversial in nature. Therefore, it seems apropos to use a framework that incorporates learned family values as a construct in understanding how social and political moral values are formed when looking at beliefs about the viewing of Internet mediated child pornography. One such framework developed by the researcher known as George Lakoff in 2002 has been designed to understand public attitudes about societal transgressions, such as viewing Internet mediated child pornography, from the standpoint of political values, family values, and morality. The Moral Politics model is designed to understand how conservatives and liberals think differently about social issues. For example, although conservatives and liberals are assumed to both bases their political beliefs on a set of ...