Sex-Bots Revisited: Bioethics and Parody in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's most celebrated and iconic writers, has shown an interest in exploring issues relevant to contemporary audiences in her fiction since the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). Atwood's diverse body of literary work addresses important current concerns such as gender inequality, technology, consumerism, and the climate crisis. In her more recent dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last (2015), Atwood imagines the US as a wasteland devastated by economic crisis. Within this fictional landscape, a social experiment emerges as a seemingly ideal social model, while the survivors must navigate new and complex circumstances. The novel contains several instances of parody and satirical commentary on contemporary consumerist practices and the obsession with technology and artificiality. Sex dolls, referred to as prostibots in The Heart Goes Last, play a pivotal role in Atwood's exploration of technological progress and its implications for humanity. Drawing on theories of posthumanism, bioethics, and narratology, this paper aims to analyse Atwood's inherently parodic construction of sex dolls as Gothic embodiments of artificial others. These prostibots not only redefine what it means to be human but also draw attention to the anxieties associated with the emergence of posthuman replicas, which, in turn, raise various biological and ethical issues.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it