That's so funny you mention her! Because of the discussion above, I've been thinking over doing a post on how to "read" Egyptian art, and I was thinking that she'd definitely be a section in that. I taught Egyptian history at a university (as a TA) and the professor of that class was strongly of the belief that the ritual defacing was not based on her femaleness but on her perception as a usurper. I saw a debate on FB about this recently in which a woman who is a staunch feminist was tearing apart someone who had posted a picture of one of her surviving statues and made a quip about her beard. She gave a rather one dimensional assessment of the whole thing. (To clarify, I also count myself as a feminist.) I was going to chime in about the complexities of the debate but decided not to... previous experiences on chiming in with a "well, actually..." on FB have taught me that those can have some rather nasty unintended consequences. Either way, I think it's fair to say that sexism has been present all throughout history, but one should approach with caution when automatically reading sexism as the prime motivation in every scenario, because you run the risk of inserting modern bias into ancient history.

Also, I very much agree that she should be as famous as Cleopatra. Her story may not be as mythologized and scandalous, but that's only because of the advantage of being of the Greco-Roman era and not of an era where we only recently re-learned how to read the source literature.