There’s something engaging about playing in a morally gray space as a writer. I like writing about different cultures and making up cultures where the morality doesn’t quite fit. This would be considered immoral in our culture, yes, but it isn’t considered immoral in this one. This character has no framework for considering this behavior as bad. Are the people perpetuating this behavior bad people? What goes into characterizing behavior as bad or good?
Unfortunately this is a good way to get garroted by a certain subsection of readers.
One of the characters in the story is basically a live-in prostitute who is expected to be sexually available to any of the other characters who want to have sex at any given time. He has no meaningful way to refuse sex, since if he turns someone down, he would be in trouble.
This also bleeds into the way he views consent with others. He finds it anxiety-inducing to be turned down for sex (it's part of his job, so if he gets turned down, he must not be performing well enough), so he can get a little pushy with it. The fact that he also can't refuse sex and there's very little overt consent in the society means it's easy to misread sexual cues. Initiating and refusing sex are often not explicit, which means that it's easy to misread things if not everyone is on the same page.
The end result of this is that he ends up nearly sexually assaulting the main character due to misread cues, and while he has been essentially assaulted himself, he genuinely wouldn't see it that way and would be offended if it was suggested.
