let's take your dinner example to its logical conclusion, because you are on to something here, but I don't think quite in the way that you think.
children are forced to eat food that they this really dislike (due to sensory issues, allergies, or just run of the mill unfamiliarity) quite regularly by their caregivers. they are also sometimes denied the right to eat because they didn't behave the way their caretakers liked, and sent to bed hungry, or barred from eating food that they can handle, and instead left to go hungry because they won't eat food they can't handle.
treatment like this causes a lot of food issues and trauma to children. It exacerbates eating disorders and erodes a child's sense of their own body autonomy. It can also cause children to have nutritional issues and a scarcity mentality around food that can be really damaging to them.
similarly, people are forced to share meals with people who they are viscerally uncomfortable around all the time too, often to extreme negative effects. employees are forced to sit down with clients who debase them or harass them. Young people in particular are forced into sharing tables with relatives who have crossed their boundaries, insulted them, abused them, bullied them, and whom they want nothing to do with. people in recovery from eating disorders are surrounded by co-workers, family members, or friends at meal times who speak about calories and weight loss and comment on their own bodies and other people's bodies in incredibly invasive and triggering ways that often make them feel way worse, and make taking care of their own bodies far more difficult.
when a powerful institution wants to exert control over other people, they also often do so using food. prisoners are given almost no control over the kind of food they eat, and are often given very low quality food that is in a disgusting condition, or that violates their own nutritional requirements or religious beliefs. patients in hospitals and in mental institutions are also subjected to such treatment, and people in poverty are expected to eat anything that they are given without complaint. It is an extension of their dehumanization to control and limit the kinds of food they're allowed to access, and how and when they are permitted to eat.
each of these experiences surrounding food can be incredibly violating and harmful. food is quite frequently a tool of control and abuse. yet it is not because there is some magical quality to food or to dinners that make them uniquely fraught with the potential for trauma. these experiences are traumatic because they involve a violation of a person's body autonomy, and a lack of social power.
sex isn't any different from dinner. we just have a series of cultural beliefs surrounding it that make the pressure involving sex something that's both a lot more acknowledged, and mostly encountered in the private realm.
Sex is treated as an almost magical thing, at once both sinister and sacrosanct, and so people are primed to see the potential for harm in it, and it is frequently used as a tool for harming people because it is so loaded, but that doesn't mean there aren't abuses involving every other mundane human activity that we simply are conditioned to ignore because doing so is so normal.
People's body autonomy surrounding food is violated traumatically all the fucking time. unfortunately because we consider dinner to be a neutral activity and sex to be this incredibly fraught and almost magical one, we ignore the massive amounts of coercion, pressure, and violation surrounding food.
your boss shouldn't be able to force you to get dinner with someone. and people are uncomfortable with discussions about body autonomy that neutralize sex, because it forces them to confront how little freedom we actually have in every facet of our lives.
