I come from a long line of science-fiction fans - I grew up with my mother's collection of Heinlein, Cherryh, Donaldson, McCaffrey, Vance, etc. at my disposal, and my grandfather had a first edition set of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books that's still in the family. While none of them were quite as, er, explicit as ASOIAF, they never shied away from sexuality either. (I remember being 10 or 12 years old and encountering Master Eremis' seduction of Terisa in Mirror of Her Dreams, which was a little more frank than anything I had read previously.) But that wasn't the main reason why I read these books; there were plenty of smut novels out there to whet any appetite I might have had for that. I picked up and loved Game of Thrones because it represented everything I had always wanted from fantasy - dark, dystopian, a reasonably realistic depiction of a pseudo-medieval world where there's no clear line between the good and the bad. The sex is just a perk.

And even in the early days of widespread consumer use of the WWW, back in the mid 90s, there was never any dearth of female fans of the genre, as I recall from the Melanie Rawn and Tad Williams forums in particular.

If only the writer had done the least bit of research...