If you insist, I'll clarify my argument.
Rape culture is a large, complicated topic, and I consider the idealization of rapists as as much a part of the problem as the normalization of rape, sexual agression and domestic violence, the blurring of the lines of consent, or the victim blaming. The idealization of serial killers and also all kinds of predators (rockstars/popstarts preying on young girls being dismissed as "just the way the industry is" for example) is also a major problem.
I never said rapists should be portrayed as cavemen and to leave the subject at that. I didn't specify such views on the forum, but like you from what I get, I'm convinced of... the opposite. Rapists need to be depicted with humanity and subtlety.
Sexual violence is a "natural" consequence of patriarchy, traditional gender roles, amatonormativity, the focus on sexuality, romantic stereotypes ("Never stop pursuing the one you love!"), not to mention the omnipresent culture of "unconsent", from children being pressured to give kisses and hugs to their relatives to people who just need to be "convinced" to do something good for them.
All of these toxic ideology converge in making sexual violence an integral part of most of our lives. We need to open the dialogue about it, in many ways, we need to be able to look at our own potentially harmful past behavior and to our loved ones' too, we need to reimagine the way we deal with agressions as a community, we need to understand restorative justice and its limitations, etc.
If we want to do better, we need to see rapists as human beings.
We also need to avoid their deshumanization because of the Hannah Arendt argument - developed for nazis, but also appropriate here. Arendt's idea was that we cannot just conceive nazis as "monsters" and remove them from humanity. Because if we do that, if we allow ourselves to think they are some kind of abnormality, of innate evil, we fail to understand what lead them to act like that in the first place, and we miss the main point, the main lesson of the Holocaust and previous atrocities: that anyone, given the wrong circumstances and the wrong education, can behave like a nazi. We'd also fail to get a grasp of the terrible acts perpetrated in our societies before the fascists even rose to power, and the terrible acts that keep being perpetrated (in the end, fascist regimes are just the natural result of systems of domination, but that's another story for another time).
If we just say "rapists are monsters", we fail to self-criticize, as individuals, as communities and as a society, and so the violence keeps coming. While there's so much work to do and so much to say.
But that's the thing, I don't see David as any kind of smart or even acceptable portrayal of a rapist. David is idealized more than anything, I don't see any any complexity in him, he was great in Prometheus, subtle and ambiguous, in Covenant he's just a caricature. The movie doesn't question his thoughts, actions and positions, it sublimates them, it makes them aesthetic for the sake of aesthetics (reminds me of the Hannibal TV series, great aesthetic success, not very good politically/ethically).
You see another thing in the movie. Obviously you see David as an interesting character and a good way to explore these issues. I won't try to convince you of the opposite; the movie is certainly fuzzy enough regarding these ideas for both interpretations to be perfectly valid. However, for me, la messe est dite.
