Ignorance isn't an excuse to make someone so uncomfortable that they blow up like that.
Excuse me, but I can't agree with that statement. For example, word "gunna" (variation of "gonna", from "going to") irritates me. As far as I know, there's no logical reason.
That mean, if I'd forced to constantly been around a person who uses it, sooner or later there would be outburst. But would it be their fault? Not unless I'd explained the situation to them, and they'd keep doing it anyway, without even trying to moderate it (since, you know, it's hard to quickly change how you speaks).
We can push buttons of people around us with completely mundane and natural actions. For everything I know, there's a person that just dislike the sound of my voice somewhere. Would it be my fault that I talking around them?
Not to say that Joe was
completely blameless. But I see that situation as result of Sabah's actions and decisions
at least as much as Joe's.
First reason:
Aisha with one brief contact figured that Joe is harmless. She is exceptionally good at reading people, you may point. Yes, indeed she is. But Joe and Sabah knew each other for, iirk, almost two years to That Point. As
@The Shallow said, that been only one year. Even if he remember things better than me, a year of almost everyday contacts should be enough time for not completely socially inept person to learn what exceptionally good "reader" gets from a brief not-really-even-conversation.
And I don't believe Joe have changed that much between these two points.
So. Either she was just as much socially inept as Joe believes he is or even more (and thus since you blames Joe for being unable to decipher hints, that's fair to blame her for same, we're lives in the society of gender equality, after all), or she
knew he's a decent person, and still had her outburst (in that case, my guess that Joe's actions wasn't the only reason for her outburst, most likely correct).
Second reason:
If
his actions maked her "uncomfortable that they blow up like that", and there were
no other reasons for it, she should've at least tried to do something about it earlier.
If she thought Joe is an asshole enough to held her academics hostage, there was zero reason to think he'll just stop suddenly without either her, or an outside force, acting to stop him. And any outside force had no reason to intervene with that unless she'd ask them.
Taylor, when bullying started, at least tried to talk with a staff about it. That didn't helped her, but we all know that she was in wastly different situation.
this seems especially sexist to bring up in the context of a women being ostracized for expressing anger toward a man.
Sorry to hear that, but I don't care, in this case, what the
consequences of her actions were. I care about the
reasons. And, as I explained above, unless she had serious case of social ineptness, she should've knew Joe enough to understand that he wouldn't do anything like using her academics as a hostage. And that suggests that there were additional factors in play.
Period is one of possible explanations, because like it or no, but menstrual cycle controlled by hormones. And hormones affect our emotions. That's just facts.
Most of women during period
are emotionally unstable to
some extent. To what extent is another question. Some lucky ones not even notices it, while some being highly affected. Exact direction varies too. For some it's increased irritability, for others - sadness, etc. A pain and bleeding that not insignificant part of women experience during it adds to their bad mood too.
I don't think that disregarding a possible explanation just because it "seems sexist" is right.
Second possibility, that I mentioned as well, is her father illness.
There's of course many more options, like maybe
she been rejected recently by someone. Or maybe... We can guess about it forever without any more facts from either canon or fic.
Just tracking things like "person A sent a message to person B" is already a pretty deep intrusion, even without looking at the contents of that message.