Our brief discussion of how Snowman is a corrupting influence on the Crakers started me thinking about how Snowman teaches human principles of ranking. He introduces the concept that men and women should behave differently, picking the men to lead the trek and surround and protect the women and children. Biological sex differences may lead to men and women taking different roles, but Snowman assigns these roles of different value without explaining why, simply citing it as “the proper way” (350). The “women and children” are grouped together without question, and the narration implies that they *clearly* need protection, which is only available from the men. I don’t know how a non-monogamous society would raise its young (I wonder if there are any non-extinct animals that work like that?), but it seems like it might break down existing gender roles, not re-enforce them more strictly.

For the sake of comparison, consider the treatment of race. “[R]acism – or, as they referred to it in Paradice, pseudospeciation – had been eliminated in the model group, merely by switching the bonding mechanism: the Paradice people simply did not register skin colour. Hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it” (305). The Crakers are, in fact, color-blind when it comes to race. Unless the scientists were to completely make-over the reproductive process (a lá Butler), gender differences will remain. So, can you have differences without an attached system of ranking?

Consider the words of sociologist Robert W. Fuller in his novel on “rankism,” a blanket term for all cases of abuse within a system of power differences (e.g. racism, sexism, classism, etc.): “It is crucial to get one thing straight from the start: power differences, in themselves, are not the culprit. To bemoan power differences is like bemoaning the fact that the sun is brighter than the moon. And rank differences merely reflect power differences, so rank differences are not the problem either, any more than color or gender differences are used as an excuse to abuse, humiliate, exploit, and subjugate. So it is with power and rank” (“Somebodies and Nobodies”, 4).

I think the conceptual idea for the Crakers is similar. The idea was that they would be so perfectly engineered that “hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it” (305). I just don’t quite understand how this could be possible. They were supposedly so perfectly engineered for their environment that they wouldn’t need to make weapons, but they seemed pretty helpless without Snowman’s gun. I think the context of real life outside of a predator-less biodome really calls these engineered assumptions into question, and that includes the existence of gender roles and sexism.