Atwood intended this dystopia to evoke responses to the then-widespread AIDS epidemic: "The solution that society has come up with is that you would have to have arranged marriages, and you would have to have sexually pure participants, otherwise everyone would just die.
[2] Atwood originally intended "Freeforall" to appear in her 1994 collection Good Bones and Simple Murders but ultimately decided it did not fit the theme.
[5] At her editors' request, she included a new version of "Freeforall," abridged and slightly rewritten, in a 2023 anthology of stories Old Babes in the Wood.
[4] The story is set in the year 2026, a time of widespread and rampant sexually transmitted diseases in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
These "freeforalls," areas of sexual freedom, are tacitly encouraged, with the intent that the presumed anarchy and privation will lead to the natural elimination of disease when all the human carriers are dead.