In my experience, people who are not the likely victims of a kind of danger are much less likely to spot the warning signs of that danger than those who are. Women spot potential-rape more frequently, the same way that soldiers that have been stationed in the middle east are more likely to spot potential IEDs—not every discarded thing on the road is an IED, and not every “man roughly handling a women” is a potential rape… but some are… and some women have gotten better at spotting the latter due to either being trained to do so, or having had the experience themselves...
In other words… just because many people didn’t see it for a potential-rape… doesn’t mean it can’t easily be interpreted as pattern-matching on exactly that kind of situation.
To some extent, it doesn’t even matter that it was not the original intent of the author to represent rape. It was close enough that it was a plausible interpretation (specious or no) for those who know what to look for.
I expect the author has learned something about how people can interpret things even when they are unintended...
Interestingly, and vaguely related, there’s an ongoing debate about the Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes series: apparently many women interpret the relationship between Holmes and Watson as containing a lot of sexual tension… and a lot of men (and the writer(s)) think that idea is rubbish.… it all has to do with how close they stand to each other, and the way they are portrayed to gaze at each other.
In my experience, people who are not the likely victims of a kind of danger are much less likely to spot the warning signs of that danger than those who are. Women spot potential-rape more frequently, the same way that soldiers that have been stationed in the middle east are more likely to spot potential IEDs—not every discarded thing on the road is an IED, and not every “man roughly handling a women” is a potential rape… but some are… and some women have gotten better at spotting the latter due to either being trained to do so, or having had the experience themselves...
In other words… just because many people didn’t see it for a potential-rape… doesn’t mean it can’t easily be interpreted as pattern-matching on exactly that kind of situation.
To some extent, it doesn’t even matter that it was not the original intent of the author to represent rape. It was close enough that it was a plausible interpretation (specious or no) for those who know what to look for. I expect the author has learned something about how people can interpret things even when they are unintended...
Interestingly, and vaguely related, there’s an ongoing debate about the Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes series: apparently many women interpret the relationship between Holmes and Watson as containing a lot of sexual tension… and a lot of men (and the writer(s)) think that idea is rubbish.… it all has to do with how close they stand to each other, and the way they are portrayed to gaze at each other.