Written in 1977, "Rape Fantasies" appears to be a recap of a conversation among several women during their lunch hour, a few of them playing bridge, one--Chrissy the receptionist--reading aloud from a tabloid. When Chrissy asks the question, "How about it, girls, do you have rape fantasies?" the story unfolds with each woman’s response, all retold from the perspective of Estelle, who’s doing her best to deflect the entire conversation by concentrating on her bidding. It is her recognition of the danger of rape that drives Estelle to create fantasies in which she rescues herself through conversation and kindness. But – a smart added surprise from Atwood – Estelle’s last fantasy reveals that her isolation is so immense and desperate that she has imagined a would-be rape transformed (albeit fuzzily) into a romance, and it is just as we comprehend the depth of the narrator’s loneliness that we also reach that point in the story where we ‘get it’, and that chill I mentioned earlier fills our hearts: We’re reading a dramatic monologue… and her audience is a male bar customer. Había empezado a tener la sensación de que nada la esperaba fuera de los límites de la cama. No se trataba de vacío, sino de nada, un cero con patas en el libro de aritmética. In her first fantasy she uses a weird since of self defense. When she realized the preps motives she reaches in her bag to get the plastic lemon -something just like mace- realizing that she cant find it she asked the prep to hold her bag while she looks for it. She finds it and then sprays him with the plastic lemon.

Her last fantasy is, in Estelle’s words, “the most touching… and kind of dignified” (pg. 35) rape fantasy where she is dying of leukemia and is grabbed by a man in the same condition. She woos him and they move into an apartment where they die together. Estelle likes power; she is not helpless in her fantasies. Her fantasies of being a Kung-Fu expert demonstrate her wish for control over her body and her safety. Estelle can outwit, confuse, and fool her fantasy rapists; in fact she hopes she is not too vicious to them. The idea that the perfect woman, or the Virgin Mary, gave birth to a child while remaining a virgin presents woman with the same kind of paradoxical model as having rape fantasies, the similarity being that a woman can no more find a happy, exciting, pleasant rape than she can get pregnant and still be a virgin. As Estelle says, ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘those aren’t RAPE fantasies. I mean, you aren‘t getting RAPED, it ‘s just some guy you haven’t met formally who happens to be more attractive than Derek Cummins,… and you have a good time. Rape is when they’ve got a knife or something and you don’t want to’ (32). En cuanto a Fred, ha dejado de intrigarme. Os Freds de este mundo se delatan por lo que hacen y por lo que eligen. Son las Bettys las que resultan misteriosas. Despite the name, "Rape Fantasies" is the funniest story in the collection, and one of the most interesting. Starting with a Cosmo-style magazine piece about how all women have rape fantasies once in a while, the ladies of the office pool compare theirs. Our snarky narrator spins increasingly hilarious and absurd variants, partly to amuse herself and partly to annoy her co-workers. My favorite is the one where a rapist with a cold comes into her window, only to find that she, too, has a cold. "I'b goig to rabe you," he says through stuffy nose. They lie in bed handing each other kleenex and watching the Late Show.In his masterful ‘Guests of the Nation’, Frank O’Connor employs a carefully drawn Irish soldier and his unforgettable grief at the horror of war. The story was published in 1931, but never grows dated. So too ‘Rape Fantasies’, first published in Atwood’s 1977 collection Dancing Girls. Using a lonely, lively, and sometimes foolish woman as a lens, Atwood shines a brilliant, lasting beam on another incomprehensible aspect of human existence – and we are all the better for it. Although "Rape Fantasies" is one of Atwood's most popular stories, little criticism of her work focuses on it specifically. Several critics have noted that Estelle seems to be a naive protagonist, but that view is rejected by an equal number of reviewers. Estelle and her female coworkers have very different ideas on what romance is and how to obtain it without falling prey to the insidious forces in society. The story is often used as a starting point for discussing the gap between men's and women's perceptions of each other. The themes of this story are the quotes that are displayed through the paper and the definition of rape, why it’s taking lightly and how is the issue getting solved.

Yo soy el círculo. Tengo los polos en mí interior. Lo que debo hacer es seguir intacta, depende de mí. Estelle informs her co-workers that the ‘rape fantasies’ they describe over lunch are not rape fantasies, but fantasies of exciting sex with strangers. “Rape,” Estelle says, “is when they’ve got a knife or something and you don’t want to.” The ‘rape fantasy’ Estelle offers her co-workers, however, is a comic scenario: her would-be-rapist politely assists Estelle in a search through her handbag for the plastic lemon which, once found, she uses to squirt stinging juice into the man’s eyes. I always am and they know it. There’s no point in being anything else, is the way I look at it, and sooner or later the truth will out so you might as well not waste the time, right? (33) We can see that the similarities between this fantasy and her others have something in common. Unlike Chrissey’s or Greta’s fantasies, none of them actually involve any kind of actual sexual act. By the end of the story, we believe that the polite rapist who gets the lemon juice in his eye is part of an actual fantasy of Estelle’s. Deseo explicarle lo que nadie le ha enseñado, cómo se comportan dos personas que se quieren, que evitan hacerse daño, pero no estoy segura de saber.She considers rape, how rape has recently been treated like a new scourge, and how essays and tips on rape prevention have become something of an institution themselves. Estelle recalls a conversation during a recent bridge game, where “rape fantasies” was the topic and her lunchmates each offered a feeling about it, from disgust to confusion to admitted interest in elaborate, particular fantasies. The man is preoccupied with Christine because “Initially he waited outside the lecture rooms for her to come out. She said hello to him curtly at first and kept on going, but this didn't work; he followed her at a distance, smiling his changeless smile. Then she stopped speaking altogether and pretended to ignore him, but it made no difference, he followed her anyway. The fact that she was in some way afraid of him—or was it just embarrassment?—seemed only to encourage him.” The man’s puzzling behavior is unfathomable because he does not declare explicitly why he keeps Christine under surveillance. One would construe him to be an fanatical lover who wants to be in command of Christine’s engagements. His fortitude, notwithstanding, Christine’s disinterest, is bothersome as he may put her safety on the line. Update this section!