A nice article, but mistaken on a few counts. As I've now discussed quite a bit on this board there's good reason to think that this scene was lazy and an poor-decision on the showrunners' parts. I'll cover the points in brief, since I've posted about this more substantially elsewhere (see my comment history for deets):

It doesn’t tell us anything new.

The author's response to this argument is too narrow. The same tasks that he alleges the scene accomplished could be accomplished by having the rape off-screen. This would, perhaps more importantly, give us more time for actually informative scenes. Consider by comparison: we get a shot of Theon, hunched, standing to the right of Sansa's bedchamber door. He's horrified. The door opens, revealing a naked Ramsey (+1 for male nudity), who pats Theon as he walks right out of the shot. In the doorframe, out of focus, we see a naked Sansa on the bed. She gets out of the bed and walks to the door. She stands tall in the doorframe, looking out towards the left - unbowed, unbent, unbroken. Theon collapses to the floor. /scene

What we get in this version is the aftermath, with a focus on Sansa standing taller than Theon. We see that she completely owns Littlefinger's advice from the previous episodes and that, despite Ramsey's vile enthusiasm, she remains proud, calculating, and all that she became in the finale of the last season. It's entirely visual storytelling that sets up the next episode quite well, without lingering on the grotesque for its own sake. Everything speaks for itself, without 'telling' us what we should think. It's also a better ending to an hour of tense television.

But there were other scenes in the past that got rape wrong.

The response to this objection is off the mark. One of the first major reviews of the episode was hosted on the AVClub and it made a much more nuanced case than the one the author responds to here. The problem isn't that the show has done rape poorly in the past, but that if they're going to end an episode with rape then they need the audience's trust that the show will handle it well. The problem? That trust isn't there. Serial television is typically terrible at handling sexual violence against women. Game of Thrones in particular has a track record of being especially bad at dealing with it. Ending the episode with sexual violence is leaves the audience without a reason to come back. It's a poor decision on the part of the showrunners, as evidenced by the many people who've promised to quit the show.