In the following brief excerpt, Thompson talks about "Rape Fantasies, " specifically the inability of language to allow effective communication between men and women.

. . . The story winch best fits the critical stereotype of Atwood's "bubble headed/ladies' magazine fiction" (vs. her "serious poetry") is probably "Rape Fantasies." Agreed, its lower-middle-class diction, full of babbling asides and slang, is far removed from the fine intuitions of the Power Politics voices. And the subject matter, the dynamics of a female office/lunch room and the "girls'" revelations of their extremely unimaginative rape fantasies, hardly seems in the sarne league as the mythic patterns of You Are Happy or the multiple metaphors of The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Nevertheless, when the intellectual snobberies are put aside (and appropriately so, since that is one of Atwood's satiric targets here), the narrator does demonstrate an admirable sense of humour, appreciation of the ridiculous...