What I find objectionable is not so much the existence of violence and rape, and even the portrayal is mostly fine, if sometimes excessive... what irritates me is that Martin seems to think we should accept the level of misogyny we see in his world simply because his world is a reflection of Middle Ages Europe. In the text, there is no explanation for why thousands of years of association with the Rhoynish, and hundreds of years of having them as a part of the Seven Kingdoms did not lead to greater freedoms for women. The Church stand in, the Sept, seems to have a very male-only bent, but with the religion of the Seven being so different from Christianity in some fundamentals, we're left wondering why this is so.

So, while Martin's portrayal of individual women in a misogynistic setting is really excellent, his explanation for that setting itself is not. It seems to assume that misogyny would be a natural outcome of a world similar to the Middle Ages, when the fact is that several factors went into making the Middle Ages as anti-women as they were. I don't know if this is a reflection of the author's own view of women, but it certainly is a failure of world building that I don't see criticized enough.