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Rape is obviously about sex. Date rape wouldn't be the most common form of rape if it wasn't about sex.
As for why people claim otherwise, a few theories:
Sex is a basic human biological drive. If a starving person steals a loaf of bread, we tend to consider their actions at least partially justified, because they were driven by biological need. If rape is about sex, this opens the door to potentially justifying or exculpating rapists in certain circumstances.
If rape is about sex, this implies victims who dressed or acted sexy increased their odds of victimization, and this is too much like victim blaming.
An inability to model how male sexuality works, or an unwillingness to acknowledge major differences in male and female sexuality. Most women, regardless of circumstances, could never commit rape. History shows that many men, under the right circumstances, could. Look at the aftermath of almost every successful military conquest in history, for instance.
As a further corollary to #3, imagine you could somehow do a study where you asked the following question and got a totally honest answer from the study participants: "Imagine you have just committed rape. What do you think was your reason or motivation for doing so?" I think the average female answer would be something like "I hated that person and wanted to ruin their life and make them feel violated." I think the average male answer would be something like "They were just so incredibly sexy and I was just so turned on I lost control of myself." I think men and women will therefore tend to model the motivations of rapists differently because they get different answers when they try to introspect about what could possibly drive someone to commit rape.
remember that the current FBI definition of rape is
"penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."
So if a woman were to tie a man up and have sex with him against his will, it would not legally be considered rape by the FBI, unless she penetrated his anus.
However, "made to penetrate" sexual assault, which is how the CDC defines women having sex with men without their consent is apparently much more common than previously acknowledged.
Indeed, in my own experience, I find that I have been "raped" (i.e. made to penetrate without my consent,) by four women in my lifetime. Always while I had been asleep. In one case, a new girlfriend mounted me while I slept without a condom, even though I had been meticulous in my use of condomes. In a second case, a different girlfriend tried to put a condom on me after I had passed out drunk. She woke me up with sex and the condom fell off at some point. In a third case, a girlfriend invited her friend to perform fellatio on me while I was sleeping.
#metoo functioned as a major redpill for me because I had a close friend falsely accused of rape. As I began to understand exactly how feminists now define rape, I gradually became aware that according to the feminist definition of the term, I had been raped by four different women in my life, and sexually assaulted by others. The absolute hypocrisy and lack of awareness deeply disturbs me to this day, since all of those same women who raped me are strong feminists who jumped on the "believe all women" bandwagon.
I don't know what the answer to the social problem of rape is. However, I do know firsthand that modern academic feminism is built upon glaciers of bullshit over decades and their approach to the problem consistently make society worse because of a deep rooted denial of reality.
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I would blame it mostly on this tbh. In order to prevent claims of sexual difference from being used to justify disadvantaging women feminists have crawled into a dangerous hole: denying them altogether.
This "problem" can be seen in many other places - most notably in the claims that men are "shallow" in their looks-based preferences or are, even more fantastically, predators who want nubile young women for purposes of emotional manipulation.
If that shocking failure of cognitive empathy is showcased with vehemence amongst feminists every day I'm not surprised they'd deny claims of sexual difference in desire or the role it plays in assault.
From a purely rhetorical and tactical perspective "this is an evil abomination" is a better sell than "this is an aspect of male sexuality we need to watch and keep under control". Because the latter has been associated with not just limits on men but on women especially, for prudence's sake. After all: they are the party at risk.
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With regards to (1) there is some equivocation between the biological meaning of a drive (in which case sex is a drive, as any scientist would tell you) with the spiritual or moral meaning of drives. If "sex is as important as food" really was an axiom of most people, then prostitution would be legal and sexual redistribution would be in the overton window. So I don't think bullet (1) is valid. Your other points seem solid though.
The point I am getting at is roughly the "sex is good/important" progressive viewpoint @YE_GUILTY stated above, though perhaps he articulated it better.
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