He made a mistake. He did something wrong. Full stop. Fans need to stop putting historical bubble wrap around it and calling it “normal for the Regency time period” like that magically absolves him. Plenty of misogynistic things were normal in the Regency period. Wife beating, slut shaming – and yet if I saw any of that on screen, I’d still turn it off. “book accurate” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card that saves Benedict from criticism.

This is a man who has never once in his life cared what society thinks of him, who happily whores around with men and women, invited his white, widowed side-piece to his brother’s engagement party. Society’s rules have never stopped him before. But suddenly being with a maid is where he draws the line?

What he’s offering Sophie isn’t romance, it’s the proposal of a lustful, selfish, chauvinistic manchild. Asking a woman to be your mistress when you don’t even have a wife is not an offer of love. It’s an offer of convenience. And he knows. He knows making her his mistress condemns her to a life of secrecy, dependency, and social ruin. He knows that this role would require her to sacrifice her dignity and reputation for the rest of her life.  

And let’s be very clear: he is still actively searching for the Lady in Silver and intends to marry her instead of Sophie. People are going to hand-wave this away because “they’re the same person,” but he doesn’t know that. As far as he’s concerned, Sophie is the woman he sleeps with while he looks for the woman he’ll actually honour. If the Lady in Silver had turned out to be someone else, someone noble, what would Sophie have become? There is nothing romantic about asking her to accept second place, to give him her body while being denied his name, his protection, and his future.

This is a weird, unromantic power imbalance, and that’s before we even get into the rich white man/poor woman of colour optics. People defending Benedict with “well, she’s a maid” are telling on themselves by ignoring the actual issue, which is his lack of respect for Sophie as a person and as a companion. And that stupid little goofy grin when he asks her? The AUDACITY. The DISRESPECT.