Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of graphic violence, sexual violence, gender discrimination, and rape.

“Rape Fantasies” embraces elements of humor and irony to explore the societal onus put on women to protect themselves from men from sexual violence. Written from the first-person point of view of the protagonist Estelle—a nervous, reflective woman—the story toggles between scenes from Estelle’s lived experience and lengthy imagined sequences in her mind. The interplay between Estelle’s public conversations about rape and her private meditations on rape captures the Conflation of Fantasy and Reality. Because Estelle is constantly exposed to representations of rape in the media, she feels she must consider the subject. However, the magazine and television reports represent rape as if “it was just invented” or as if “it’s something terrific” (163). As a result of this reporting, Estelle begins to regard rape similarly—as exciting. She blends her real fear of being attacked and raped by a stranger with pleasant sexual fantasies. Estelle recalls discussing the topic of rape fantasies with her coworkers during lunch, over a game of bridge. 

The text’s references to the lunchroom and the women’s card game create a lighthearted but mundane mood. The women spend time together—sharing space, food, and conversation— but the subject of their conversation starkly contrasts with the casual setting. These women, therefore, have been socially conditioned to disregard the severity and violence of rape such that it spills into the most innocent moments of their days. However, due to constant reporting that feels distant from the lived experience of being a woman, their discussion of violence against women errs toward the insincere, the sarcastic, and the confessional. Atwood’s ironic juxtaposition of tone and topic exposes how rape culture seeps into casual conversation, shaping women’s private understandings of fear, pleasure, and power.

Because the women in “Rape Fantasies” are taught not to take the threat of rape seriously and to view it as something easily preventable, they struggle to process their fear. Societal Misunderstandings of Rape, the story suggests, have compelled women to disregard sexual violence as a real threat and to blame themselves. Atwood offers commentary on 1970s media messaging instructing women to stay inside after dark to protect themselves from sexual predators. In “Rape Fantasies,” this messaging is presented in the same way that frivolous topics surrounding “women’s culture and lifestyle” are represented. For example, Estelle remarks that the magazines print the word “rape” “in capital letters on the front cover; inside, “…they have these questionnaires similar the those they used to have about whether you were a good enough wife or an endomorph or an ectomorph” (163, 164). The magazine that Chrissy reads over lunch also asserts that “all women have rape fantasies” (164). This notion epitomizes victim blaming and aligns with the idea that “women ask for it” if they behave, dress, or act a certain way. For these reasons, Estelle and her coworkers either trivialize the notion of rape, minimize the fear they carry around rape or dismiss the topic as disgusting or embarrassing. Their responses prove how the media has dictated their outlooks on their own bodies, desires, and fears. For example, they either blush, nervously chomp celery, or openly admit that the article is right and that they are indeed like all women, romanticizing rape for their own private pleasure. In this way, the story becomes a satire of how harmful ideas are internalized through the casual repetition of misinformation.

Estelle’s anxious state of mind bleeds into her narration, creating a harried, nervous mood. Throughout the short story, Estelle employs the first-person direct address. This narrative stance implies that she is talking to someone else. Her audience is never explicitly identified, but her perspective and tone make clear that Estelle is aware of another presence, asking “remember that?” to her audience (164). Estelle lives in constant anticipation of a stranger approaching, grabbing, threatening, and/or attacking her. The imagined or perceived audience behind her narration enacts the psychological phenomenon where women live with a heightened awareness of their surroundings, for fear that someone will take physical, emotional, or sexual advantage of them. Estelle’s narration is also defensive in that she is constantly doubling back on her thoughts, rephrasing her assertions, or correcting the feelings she’s described. She has been taught to regard herself as an object of shame. She is always ready to be corrected for her own experience or perception. This social conditioning is reflected in her narration, as she obsessively tries to present her internal experience in a palatable way. She masks her fear with rationalizations because she’s been taught that this fear is illegitimate if she follows the rules. Her rambling tone, compulsive need to clarify, and desire to entertain her imagined listener all reveal the emotional labor women perform to make their fears socially palatable.

Estelle’s use of language also enacts her anxious, defensive energy. Because the media has dictated the Dynamics of Female Discourse and limited her ability to talk freely with her peers, she is caught in an internal mental loop. When she goes over each of her fantasies in the privacy of her mind, she uses elliptical syntax that enacts her harried state of mind. Her depiction of her scariest fantasy exemplifies this formal dynamic:

I do have a scarier one though…where the fellow says he’s hearing angel voices that’re telling him he’s got to kill me, you know, you read about things like that all the time in the papers. In this one I’m not in the apartment where I live now, I’m back in my mother’s house in Leamington and the fellow’s been hiding in the cellar, he grabs my arm when I go downstairs to get a jar of jam and he’s got hold of the axe too, out of the garage, that one is really scary (168).

In this passage, Atwood’s use of ellipses and comma splices creates an urgent atmosphere and tone. This fantasy is so terrifying to Estelle that all of her sentences blur together. The “plot points” in the fantasy are also connected, each image or moment blending into the next. This syntactical presentation captures the intensity of the scene Estelle is describing. It is a scenario that encompasses her veritable fear, which she describes in an earlier passage when remarking on what a true rape fantasy is: It is a situation where “what you should feel is this anxiety” and when “you try to remember everything you’ve read about what to do,” you can’t remember it (167). The stream-of-consciousness style in this passage (and throughout Estelle’s narration) captures the deep-seated fear that Estelle has surrounding sexual violence. However, she cannot assert or describe these fears in simple, plain sentences because she has been taught to feel ashamed of them. This narrative style mirrors Estelle’s psychological state: fragmented, repetitive, and charged with dread.

Estelle’s meditations on rape expose the way society’s dilution of sexual violence further endangers women. Instead of addressing men’s role in these trends, the media puts the onus on the woman. As a result, Estelle obsesses over what she would say to her imagined rapist. She believes that if she could convince her attacker that she is human, he would not attack her. Her mind moves in circles around these thoughts, playing out endless scenarios where she tries to deliver herself from violence via her own wit. The same cyclical pattern, the story implies, has played out throughout history. Because sexual violence has not been addressed and because women have been held responsible for their own victimization, cycles of violence against women have continued for generations. In this sense, Estelle’s fantasies are not just absurd or self-defensive—they are a desperate form of mental rehearsal shaped by a world that has given her no real tools for safety.

Later in the story, Estelle imagines increasingly surreal scenarios that reveal her loneliness and her desire for connection. In one fantasy, a would-be rapist becomes a leukemia patient like herself, and the two spend their remaining days lying in bed, sharing their sorrow. This fantasy, unlike the others, ends in intimacy and emotional recognition. Estelle even admits that sometimes the fantasy makes her cry. This vulnerability introduces a new layer to the story’s commentary: Beneath Estelle’s rehearsals of violence is a longing to be seen and understood. Atwood suggests that women’s fear is not only about what might happen to them but also about the impossibility of being known in a world that reduces them to bodies or types.

Another significant moment occurs when Estelle fantasizes about a man with a cold who breaks into her home but, needing a tissue and a drink, ends up staying to watch TV. This moment blurs threat and companionship, reinforcing how Estelle has internalized the idea that her safety depends on defusing violence through care. These “nonviolent” endings are just as revealing as the frightening ones. They show how deeply Estelle has absorbed the message that empathy is her last defense because it will humanize her.