I think it's a tricky kind of thing because the terms of the argument get obscured. I enjoyed the first two of Mark Lawrence's Thorn books (and the third is currently sitting in my TBR pile), but I feel like he's being a bit disingenuous when he objects to people characterizing his books as particularly rapey. In that post and in the subsequent comments, he says that there are only 61 words in the entire book about rape. As he facetiously notes in the comment section, there are more words about doors than rape.

But that is idiotic, and it really bothers me that nobody in the comments section calls him out on this. The second instance of rape that he cites is, in his telling, only five fairly short sentences long, but this is preceded by most of a chapter building up to the rape, which itself happens off screen. Lawrence doesn't include the lengthy, euphemistic conversations that characters have about the "treasure" available to the characters, or the fact that the main character straight up taunts a farmer about the impending rape of his daughters or the joke that the main character makes about raping farmer's daughters. These things all take place in the opening pages of the novel.

It's one thing to object if people are wrongly criticizing your novel for containing excessive rape, but in my opinion you lose the moral high-ground in that argument if the first two chapters of your novel establish most of the main characters as amoral serial rapists. His offense at his critics' hyperbole is really undermined by his own tendency to understate the importance of rape in his book. If you're going to write a book about a merry band of rapists taking over the kingdom, objecting to people calling your book a rapefest seems really strange.

And this is the thing, I think. When Mark Lawrence (and judging by the comments, a bunch of his readers) defends his book against the charge of being filled with rape, he's only focused on the words that describe the specific physical act of rape. He is clearly excluding instances in which characters threaten to rape someone, or characters talking about finding people to rape, or people making jokes about rape, all of which, while not the physical act of rape, contribute to an atmosphere of sexual violence against women in which rape plays an active role.

Sidenote: I didn't actually intend to come down so hard on Mark Lawrence when I started writing this. I vaguely remembered that Lawrence had a post about rape in his books, but I first read the post long before I actually read his books, to the extent that while I remembered its existence, I didn't remember any of the content. I enjoyed his books a lot in spite of the atmosphere of sexual violence, and looked up the blogpost because I thought it would provide a thoughtful counterpoint. I didn't expect it to be so clueless, because I generally find Mark's contributions to this subreddit very thoughtful.