Objectively, we know that many in the audience were also horrified by what they were seeing - because they verbally stated this afterwards. The moderator clearly had no explicit "intent" and the subject has also stated that she didn't detect this as "sexism". But had noone in the audience spoken out, a large portion of the audience would have come away feeling they had experienced a reminder that women are subject to routine gender-based mistreatment - even if neither person on stage saw it that way.