Well, the point is to depict a very coarse world that has no finesse in how it treats its women. It wouldn't be so shocking if the actions themselves weren't shocking. The whole
point is to shock the reader - this in turn, the thought process goes, is likely to trigger reflections in the reader about how these events affect the characters. If people were just rude to women it wouldn't trigger as much awareness. The violence and brutality is what drives the whole point home.
And I don't think I need to go into the fact that we have an awful lot of violence and brutality in our own society; much of it is just hidden under the surface, although in the age of the Internet this is changing somewhat.
Also I don't think Zach was intending to say Martin should be regarded on the same tier as Nabokov. Obviously Nabokov's prose is superior to all but a handful of other 20th century writers'.
Originally Posted by
Del Murder
Did he state this somewhere? Cause most of the time it seems like he's doing it just because it's his novels and he can put whatever he wants in them.
I can't remember if he's explicitly said it (I think he's implied it at least) but if you read interviews with him it's obvious that he's put a lot of thought into why the women are treated the way they are and many of them, such as
ADWD spoilerCersei being paraded naked through King's Landing, are based on actual historical events. The texual evidence for this is pretty strong, anyway, since you'd have to be an oaf to miss how much the women in Martin's novels suffer, and how much of this suffering is directly consequent of the misogyny of the setting.