The differences between "book smarts and street smarts" apply to women with the librarian trope. Also, there is a Joan Rivers quip that "No man ever put his hand up a woman's skirt to get a library card. I'm not sure what either of those gets me, Sally.
On street smarts, it's not clear what street smarts would have gotten her. Before anyone could do anything she found herself trapped in a parked car that was surrounded by bikers who'd decided they were going to rape her. Rockford was trapped too, and he has plenty of street smarts. He ended up getting beaten so badly he was in the hospital.
The only way he could have prevented that was to just let the bikers do what they wanted and make no attempt to help her. On the second, that simply points out that she's a woman and, as such, vulnerable to a man who decides he wants to rape her for whatever reason. In this case, it's clear the bikers had decided they wanted to cause trouble and Rockford and his date were unlucky enough to get in the way. I'm trying to remember whether any other episodes of the show involved rape. I've been rewatching the series from the beginning and I don't recall any.
One of the recurring characters is a prostitute who's also Rockford's friend. I believe she gets badly beaten in at least one episode, but not raped. This may have been the only rape in the whole series, which was not particularly focused on assaults of various kinds.
Nor, for that matter, do I think there were many rape episodes on TV in 70s. And for the show to center, not only on a rape, but on a gang rape, that's a big deal. Is the fact that the victim was a librarian interested in physics, is that just plain old American anti-intellectualism? It doesn't feel like it. Maybe the idea was simply to make her as different as possible from the men who raped her. So, let's push that a little farther. Why make it a gang rape instead of an ordinary one-on-one rape?
