As the media report instances of vanished or violated selves — of bodies that disappear and identities that are stolen; of sex changes and sexually ambiguous bodies (the adulated bodies of rock stars); raped bodies and the promise or threat of replicated bodies — the happy endings of fairy tales, and the tales themselves, seem fanciful and remote, irrelevant to our times. They may enthrall a child who is not yet playing video games, but what attraction, if any, can they have for adults coping with the complexities of a technological world in which identity is linked to an unsecured alterable body? I raise the question not to argue its irrelevance (surely a pointless undertaking), but to evoke the heuristic values attributed generally to fairy tales by folklorists and cultural critics throughout the Western world. I wish to make a specific claim: fairy tales — in particular, the changeling tale — provide unexpected and timely insights into a self increasingly vulnerable to tampering, violation, and theft. These various forms of violence are subsumable under rape in its root meaning: forcible seizure. As an assault upon women, rape raises particular issues about the body and sex, sexual difference, and power. The very meanings of these terms — how they are constituted and denned — have become a matter of contention to contemporary feminists and cultural, literary, and juridical critics. Though this essay does not engage directly in their disputes, it too finds the body, sex, and power contentious terms as they figure in a forcible exchange of identities that fairy tales represent as actual and modern fiction adumbrates as rape.