Reader demographic?

Good morning!

When I started writing, I believed that my readers would consist of a few teenaged boys and some frustrated middle-aged men. I've found this fall that the greater part of my sales occur on the weekend afternoons and evenings when those groups would normally be occupied with football games. That leads me to think that the sales are coming from women; football widows. Don't get me wrong, I like women. I just didn't think that what I wrote would appeal to them. I write for the man that I was from age 13 to the present, and I like for the stuff I read to have lots of action and to be sexually tittilating without being explicit. So, why do women find my stuff appealing?

I've asked this question before and not received an answer from anyone. Due to the lack of a response to my question, I can only surmise that women are more like men than I supposed. I tried to learn what caused them to respond so well to my novels by reading a couple of modern romance stores and am at a non-plus. Some of the most popular modern romance stories available on Kindle have little to differentiate them from some of the porn I read back in the 70's. Not as much dirty language, but the content, and the description of the 'action' is right on a par with old-style porn.

I'm not a prude, but I grew up reading sci-fi written by people like Robert A. Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, A. E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov and others like them. In their novels, sex wasn't even a closed door item. If it existed in their stories at all, it was so far off-stage that it could never even be referred to, though Heinlein included it in his later stories. I admit that the sex in my stories is of the closed door variety, with teasing glimpses of something more, but still not explicit. As a result of my queries, I must conclude that I am still puzzled concerning the success of Gulf of the Plains with women.

Thank you,
Derek A. Murphy
Author of It Happens Every Day, Questionable Interests and others.
Available on Kindle