The genre literally was made for women because it was targeted to housewives.

I agree with you that the genre - or at least the daytime TV soap genre - was indeed targeted to housewives & made for women. Moreover, the daytime soap genre was made for American women pushed out of the workplace & relegated to being housewives after WW2 by men running TV production companies & networks. These men were part of a larger campaign sponsored by the US government & establishment to get women reconciled to being pushed out of the paid workforce & stuck at home. In the case of daytime soaps specifically, the men who made them & targeted them at women were also working at the behest of male-run corporations who sponsored such shows or otherwise paid for them by buying advertising time. Many of the corporations that funded this genre of TV entertainment manufactured soap, laundry & dish detergents & household cleaning products; hence, the nickname "soap operas."

I’m not saying all women like soaps, but they are absolutely made to target women.

But in your previous you said that watching & liking soap opera style melodramas "is considered feminine" & you implied this is because of something you deem is innate in female people. Now you are saying something totally different. Also, at the end of this most recent post, you revert to you original claim that watching soap operas "is considered feminine" when you assert that

It’s a feminine coded activity. [One of many] activities society takes as feminine

So which is it?

Interestingly, in the passage of mine you chose to quote, you only address one of the two main points I made & ignore the other. My other point was about your tendency to take your own personal beliefs about what is "feminine" and project them onto all of human society in the effort to make it seem that your own idiosyncratic views are universal views held by pretty much everyone on earth. I suggested that this tendency smacks of male socialization, & of narcissism & solipsism, though I did say that "maybe this isn't the case with you." But how about you address this other point?

You seem to have given a great deal of thought to how your own views of what's "feminine" & "masculine" developed & why you idealize the former & abhor the latter. But you don't seem to have given much thought to the possibility that your own views & feelings are just that - your own. Rather, you seem insistent on believing your own views & experience apply to everyone else too, as if there is one "human experience" overall & your own experience represents it. Seriously, what is that all about?

Have you ever been around a male child in school of any sort? You can get bullied as a girl or a faggot for months for wearing a pink shirt. You vastly underestimate how hard gendered norms are attached and enforced if you think most people don’t code things as masculine or feminine.

You are attributing the bullying you got to "gendered norms," not to the homophobia, misogyny, male supremacy & authoritarian impulse toward social convention that underlie "gendered norms" & gave rise to them in the first place. I am sorry you were bullied & called homophobic slurs. My hunch is that most of the people who did this bullying were males, so this was mainly male-on-male homophobic bullying. But you weren't bullied "as a girl" like you say. You were bullied as a boy by other boys who were as misogynistic as they were homophobic. If they called you a girl, it was because in their eyes, that was the ultimate put-down, the worst insult they could come up with. They did not actually see you "as a girl."

As for your query, "Have you ever been around a male child of any sort?" & then your description of the bullying you got in school: In this remark & many others on these threads over many months, you give the impression that you think you & other males like you are the only ones who ever got bullied in school. Which illustrates my earlier point that IMO you appear to have a self-centered POV that is clear evidence of male socialization, solipsism & narcissism.

For the record, girls get constantly bullied by boys in school. And girls get routinely sexually molested by boys in school too. This happens whether we are "gender conforming" or non-conforming. Boys & men do this to us because we are female, not because we are - or are not - "feminine."

I was a girl child who was frequently sexually harassed & groped by boys in throughout my schooling. This started in first grade when boys nicknamed me "skinhead" after a hairdresser went overboard in giving me the pixie cut lots of little girls my age customarily wore, & when two boys shoved me into a coat closet, pushed me onto the floor & punched me as they pulled up the skirt of my school uniform & pulled down my underpants.

In lower & middle school, I & other girls I went to school with were verbally abused & physically abused by boys pretty much every day. Boys would routinely insult us for running & throwing "like a girl," for being "stupid/dumb like a girl," for being "gross like girls" & "spastic/slow/klutzy like girls." Boys would push us, pull our hair, trip us, aim spitballs at us, grab our books & lunches & toss them to one another, & as we got older they would routinely gang up to corner & grope us to see if we were developing breasts yet or wearing bras. Starting in 6th grade (US school), girls who had long hair & had the bad luck to sit in front of certain especially malevolent boys in the school I attended often had the ends of their hair singed or burnt off by the boys' Bic lighters too. Once we got to age 10-11 and started sprouting breasts & menstruating, boys' sexual harassment & body shaming of us girls ramped up even worse.

Later in my schooling, I was one of a small number of women in the first class of female students admitted as undergraduates to a prestigious US university that had been all-male for hundreds of years until then. Whilst the majority of male students, professors & administrators were decent to us, a significant number were not. As a result, I & the other women in my class were bullied on a regular basis by male students & some professors & administrators just for being there. We were called all sorts of awful names too disgusting to repeat. A number of male students threatened us with rape & other forms of physical assault as well. I got death threats, & once during first year some male students doused my dorm room door with lighter fluid & set it on fire.

I've taught classes for young children in school & in summer programs. I am the mother of grown sons. As a mum, I have hosted many birthday parties, groups sleepovers, camping trips & house parties for large groups of young males. I know full well how sexist, misogynistic & homophobic males can be, particularly school-age ones. Based on this, I disagree with you that the root cause of male bullying of girls & women, & of boys perceived to be homosexual, or to have homosexual leanings, is "gendered norms." I think the root cause is sex.

BTW, when I was at uni in the 70s, the only students who watched daytime soap operas were men who belonged to fraternities. Maybe this was because frat houses were the only places on campus that had TVs. Or maybe frat guys enjoyed soaps especially in the company of other guys.

When prime time TV soap operas came on the scene in the late 1970s with shows like Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing & Falcon Crest, they were avidly watched by both sexes. In the US alone, 83 million people tuned in to the "who shot JR?" episode of Dallas the night it first aired. Do you really think that all or the majority of the audience was women? And that all the males who watched were of the opinion that they were engaging in "a feminine coded activity" & thus should be dubbed "feminine" as a result?

As for your claim that Greg House's soap-opera watching "was a joke" like John Spartan knitting, maybe so. But the joke was on genderists like you who believe every human being lives our lives, and insist we must live our lives, by hewing to the strict, rigid and regressive sexist stereotypes you are so fixated on. When in point of fact, there have always been lots of men who do things genderists today personally think are "feminine coded" such as yarn arts, textile crafts & all the rest of the activities that you say "society takes as feminine" & which genderists nowadays erroneously claim have always been regarded as such in all time periods and across all cultures.

In Western culture specifically, membership in knitting guilds from circa 1200-1700 were for males only. Yes, during this time, the Virgin Mary was frequently depicted as knitting in paintings & drawings. But that didn't change the fact that only males could be trained as master knitters, & only males were allowed to learn/know the secrets of knitting as a high art. Over time, simple knitting of items like socks & caps was done outside the guild system by males & females alike. Only much later, after industrialization, did hobby knitting become a parlor craft partaken of largely by women like Britain's Queen Victoria.

Just do an image search of "men knitting" & "men knitting military" & you'll find many paintings & photos showing men from past eras knitting. In the 20th century, US soldiers recovering from war injuries commonly knit, as did soldiers during downtime. My father, a US Navy bomber & recon pilot in the Pacific during WW2, & the rest of his squadron & many other flight crews on the same air base used to knit to pass the time & help quell the anxiety between missions. My ex-father-in-law did much the same during his service, only his outfit got more into needlepoint than knitting (& after the war my ex FIL took up hooking rugs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting#/media/File:Shepherd_Sitting_Up.jpg

https://www.dharmatrading.com/home/did-you-know-about-men-and-knitting.html