The only reason the humiliation took place was because she agreed to go through with it due to her delusions of grandeur. I feel that reading it as some sort of degradation is very shallow, in reality it was the first moment for her that grounded her in reality and made her realize that her royal bloodline doesn’t mean much at the end of the day as she’s no different from her subjects.

In response to both of the questions you put in, I, quite frankly, don’t care about this as much as you do. I don’t quite understand why you feel so invested in defending Martin as some apex of strong female characters. He’s a fine step in the right direction, and he certainly cares about writing as strong of women as he can, and he succeeds where many other authors have failed, and/or simply not tried at all. 

That said, I’m sorry, but I don’t think George R.R. Martin’s works can be held up to the same level as those of Erica Jong and Jeanette Winterson, and I don’t think any amount of back and forth will convince either one of us of much of anything. Literature still has a long way to go towards any sort of equality, and I’m not going to rest laurels on Martin for doing a job better than anyone else. In spite of all of this argument, if our expectations are so low that Cersei Lannister can meet them, then we can applaud that effort sure, but maybe we also need to raise them up a little bit higher.