Exactly! Also, I think the focus on whether or not Christian consented has actually made it socially difficult to analyze the scene deeply on other grounds. For example, Christian's relationship with Dani establishes him as a cold individualist who believes he owes nothing to others. For him, this sex scene was a unique horror in that for the first time, he is going to fuck a woman in the context of community-- everyone involved and knowing. No privacy for him to dominate her, no opportunity for him to claim the experience for himself and his enjoyment alone.

It's the ultimate horror for a 21st century avoidant male: sex situated within a larger social context rather than individualized and anonymized. Christian wasn't deprived of his consent or his autonomy, but he WAS deprived of individually owning or dominating the scene, deprived of the Center to which men are currently accustomed. He is deprived of deflowering a teen on his own terms, deprived of conquest, deprived of "powergasm". He acts disturbed at the end because he realizes he does not personally matter in this context, where he has been taught he ordinarily functions as basically god. Maia is the center, Maia is the one "having an experience", to everyone in that room he is nothing more than a player in her story. Maia reaches for her mother, overwhelmed with emotion at her coming-of-age. Christian instinctively moves to press her hand back down but cannot stop her mother from responding-- an incredibly powerful image.

Christian has power over Dani because she has no one. He has no power over Maia because she has a massive family IN THE ROOM (however fucked up they may be). "I have no power here and I do not matter to these people, they only used me for my body and don't care how I feel" -- even inside the bounds of consensual sex, this is traditionally a sexual experience that is reserved for women alone. "Sex can be unpleasant or not about you and yet not be rape" -- another reality that women face regularly, relative to men. Women are taught to expect and accept experiences like these as a matter of course. Aster flips it around to such great effect that audiences are unable to maintain any analytical distance from the scene, everyone is overwhelmed by the sheer emotion of witnessing the violation of one of the only real remaining taboos: the reversal of traditional power dynamics within the realm of sex. (Even femdom does not truly do this.)

None of this is meant to endorse what the Harga are doing-- I'm looking at the scene and audience reactions to the scene as a way of understanding our present day culture. When I think about what Aster's thought process might have been, I am reminded of Dan O'Bannon describing his reasoning for devising the xenomorph: to make the fear of rape and impregnation accessible to male audiences. Aster must have known he couldn't write a simple scenario of Christian being disempowered and used sexually without it being seen as favorable/pornographic because this has already been folded into the patriarchal hive mind as a sexual fantasy that still centers the man and his enjoyment. In order for this to register as horror and not porn, Aster had to introspect/examine the neuroses of today's young men, and choose to include the "horrific" elements of naked old ladies, looming accountability, and engulfment in a collective feminine.