I don't think this is laughable at all. Rape is greatly upsetting to any sane person because it's a violent crime committed for the sole purpose of taking control away from someone's own body. That is a scary thing indeed. Perhaps it resonates with you because you have similar fears of being stripped of control or of any kind of forced intimacy.

My husband actually has a strong reaction to any fictional depiction of rape as well, but he is a heterosexual average male. The way he has explained it was it started because he saw a movie (The Crow, I think) where the beginning of the movie started with a gang rape of a woman in her apartment. The boyfriend was shoved off the balcony and died (and he came back as a vengeful spirit). But the violent scene was shown through the girlfriend's perspective. It was very terrifying to my husband as he was pretty young when he saw it (about 10) and it just stuck with him. It resonated with him becaus through that depiction, he was put in the shoes of someone who had experienced that violence, so from then on out, he just couldn't help but empathize whenever he saw any kind of fictional depiction after that. News stories bother him too.