1960s North American cultural attitudes towards gender roles and marriage are exemplified in the "office virgins" characters Marian works with at Seymour Surveys. They are all, as their nickname suggests, virgins, who believe that sex belongs only in marriage. Lucie fears what people would say, while Emmy, the "office hypochondriac" (16), thinks it would make her sick. Their life plans are all similar: travel, get married, settle down and quit their jobs. As Rebecca Goldblatt explains in her essay "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists", these women are typical of the time period in which The Edible Woman was written and can be assumed to be set. They are "young women blissfully building their trousseau and imagining a paradise of silver bells and picket fences" (275). Goldblatt continues, "these women search for a male figure, imagining a refuge. Trapped in romantic stereotypes that assign and perpetuate gender roles, each girl does not doubt that a man is the solution to her problems" (276). The women in the novel also experience these patriarchally influenced attitudes towards the institution of marriage, although they deal with them in different ways. Marian, in particular, experiences considerable difficulty in her meeting with her boyfriend Peter Peter reveals much about the power imbalance associated with male and female gender roles in the novel. Atwood creates associations between femininity and victimization in Marian's mind, as becomes evident through Peter's speech at the Park Place hotel bar involving a hunting story. Peter tells the story, telling how he “let her go and Wham, right in the middle of the paper… to avoid becoming a victim. On a symbolic level, Marian's eating disorder can be seen as an attempt to detach herself from this cycle to avoid being processed or digested by society. In his mind, if it does not absorb the raw materials, it cannot be consumed by society and transformed into something it does not want to become. Marian's creation of the cake woman, the inspiration behind the book's title, symbolically unites the various elements of her struggle. First, it makes explicit the connections between femininity and victimization. The cake lady is the final victim; it is literally consumable. And second, it serves as a definitive statement of her rebellion against societal pressures to conform to gender roles influenced by patriarchy. Marian frosts the cake in a red dress, much the same as the red dress that signaled her surrender to Peter.