In my experience, it's less "confusion" more knowing you can't react the way you want, and he deserves you to (knee the fucker in the balls) because you'll end up being dubbed "difficult", and potentially lose your job (or in other situations a selection of other negative consequences from being given a reputation and bullied for it, to literally getting murdered).
Some will try to say the comic is a "product of its time" or whatever, but it is exactly this kind of normalisation that we've had in our popular culture and media for all these centuries that makes rape culture still so prevalent today.
Fuck this.
E: just to be clear, my issue isn't with OP posting this, it's with anyone who would brush it off as somehow ok, then or now.
This is why we have laws and policies clearly spelling out that you can't commit this kind of assault. Because it was considered funny less than 50 years ago.