I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say?

How exactly does one "judge a work in its own merit?"

How do you determine whether a movie is good or not? In a vacuum? Measuring its traits against itself?

How can anything at all be judged "on its own merits" without considering the scope of other things related to it?

How does this person writing the article judge the story against itself when they make the claim that this story is bad because men are never sexually assaulted in stories. I can name 2 popular movies off the top of my head (Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption) that had graphic depictions of men being raped and sexually assaulted.

The writer measured the story they were reviewing against the broader world. Not against itself. Therefore, considering the broader world, there's nothing particularly miscreant about a story portraying violence against a human being (male or female).

The writer's incorrect belief that men are never sexually assaulted in film and TV shows is simply limited by their immaturity and lack of knowledge of the many stories that have been told in different mediums for decades.

Let's imagine for a moment that it was instead of Andor and sexual assault, an article about Harry Potter and violence against children. And instead of claiming that anyone who writes a story in which an attractive woman is sexually assaulted has a secret attraction to sexual assault against women, she claimed that J.K Rowling secretly wanted to murder children because one of her characters wanted to do that.

Would that be a good argument?

I'm simply disagreeing with the underlying premise of the article, which is that the things that happen in a storyteller's stories illustrate some internal desire of the storyteller.