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Most of the researchers started their work about gender in the soap operas in the 1980’s. That fact remains interesting, since the greatest explosion of number of the viewers took place in the 1970’s. Staring from the very first works in the 1940’s , soaps were mainly examined on their influence to the people. Many criticised them, for the lack of realism, bad influence, addictiveness, connotations of feminine passivity, laziness and vulgarity (Seiter 1994:388). That situation changed in the 1980’s when most of behaviours taken before for granted, became the subjects of work for sociologists. The soap opera phenomena, became impossible to ignore. Especially the question of why so many women enjoy them, became the interest. Whetmore and Kielwasser noticed a paradox, analysing the opinions of the soap opera viewers. Most of them thought that reality of “Dallas”, “Dynasty” or “Bold and beautiful” is “silly” or “exaggerated”, but still in general opinions, they thought the soaps were “realistic”, “true to life” and “believable”. Another aspect of interest was the time the patience and tolerance of the viewers for boredom. Since some soaps became tapeworm-like long, it was impossible to avoid the repetitions of the storyline. Still according to Carveth and Alexander some viewers had been constantly watching for even sixteen years. The research over women watching soap operas became more frequent just 20 years ago, since it became the object of interest of many feminist scientists. Basing on interviews with woman, soaps offer them “a relaxing space”, away form pressure and problems. Again paradox in soaps occurred, because most of them contain huge amount of tension, turning points, confrontations and resolutions, witch in a “real life” are considered to be just the opposite to relaxing. One of the interviewed women, when asked about attraction of soap operas, answered: “This is my time away from everybody else, this is my dreamland…you’d be surprised […] I wanna pull my hair out… this is my escape. It’s relaxing, I walk away and I’ve got a clear head again. I can deal with the rest of the problems that I’ve gotta deal with.” The key to understand why are women attracted to soap operas is to understand how the process itself works. The plot of a soap is usually simple, main character, often woman, is almost definition of a common person, not too beautiful, but not ugly, not stupid, but not a genius.
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