Whereas the average Brazilian woman had almost six children in 1970, in the soap operas most female characters under the age of fifty had none, and the rest had one. Right after soaps became available in an area, the number of births would drop sharply; moreover, women who had children in those areas named their children after the main characters in the soap.31 The novelas ended up projecting a very different vision of the good life than the one that Brazilians were used to, with historic consequences.
