The plastic lemon that Estelle references carrying in her purse symbolizes the media’s dilution of sexual violence. In Estelle’s rape fantasy featuring the plastic lemon, she references the fact that the media “always says you should carry a plastic lemon in your purse” (166). This messaging suggests that women will be safe if they simply bring the proper self-protection mechanisms with them when they’re out. If a woman has a plastic lemon (which is a literal fabrication of a real fruit), she has the tools to ensure that she is not attacked or sexually violated. The image of the plastic replica of the lemon conjures notions of falseness. The same is true of how the media represents rape—as a nonissue that women should not obsess over. The lemon’s comedic function in the story also critiques the absurdity of reducing women's safety to novelty advice. That Estelle fumbles for it in her fantasy, and that her attacker patiently waits for her to find it, underscores how illusory these “solutions” really are.

Estelle and her friends’ rape fantasies, the central motif in the text, are symbolic of both fear and sexual desire. In the lunchroom scene, the women share hypothetical scenarios where strange men appear in their lives and they end up having sex. In Greta’s fantasy, Greta is lounging on her couch when a man swings onto her apartment balcony on a rope and they have sex in her living room. In Chrissy’s fantasy, she is taking a bubble bath when a man appears in her bathroom, undresses himself, and joins her in the tub. In both of these fantasies, the women are in relaxed states. They are taking care of themselves and enjoying their alone time—interludes which are only improved when they happen upon the opportunity for sex. Their fantasies are examples of female desire and pleasure. The women deem them “rape” fantasies because they’ve been societally conditioned to demonize their own sexuality. 

In Estelle’s more violent fantasies, men sneak into her house and try to kill her, attack her in dark alleys, thrust their bodies onto her, or knock her out and rape her while she’s unconscious. These imagined sequences capture Estelle’s terror of sexual violence. However, she also casts them as “fantasies” because she has learned to illegitimize her fear of rape. In both contexts, the women’s rape fantasies capture how both Societal Misunderstandings of Rape and the cultural Conflation of Fantasy and Reality continue cycles of violence and further endanger women. Some of Estelle’s fantasies—such as the one where she connects with a man who also has leukemia—reveal a longing for vulnerability and mutual recognition. These imagined scenarios are not about sex or domination at all, but about being seen and understood. Atwood uses the term “rape fantasy” ironically, to critique how language itself collapses when women try to articulate real fears under patriarchal logic.