A bop is a sexually promiscuous young woman. It is not to be confused with bop as in ‘catchy song’, nor bop as in ‘embarrassing Oxbridge disco’, nor the avant-garde jazz style pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s. If only.
No, this kind of bop is an acronym for ‘baddie on point’. It refers to women who use their bodies to make money online. The opportunities to do so have hugely increased owing to online platforms such as OnlyFans, which allows ‘creators’ to charge customers for exclusive ‘content’. In other words, it empowers anyone with an internet connection to become a freelance pornographer.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Apparently. OnlyFans creators often credit the site with transforming their personal finances. In November 2024, Sophie Rain, 20, a self-professed Christian virgin from Florida, claimed to have made $43 million in her first year on OnlyFans – including $4.7 million from a single user.
She has since further capitalised by setting up Bop House, a sort of rolling sleepover/convent/reality-TV show in Florida, currently home to eight OnlyFans creators. The members of Bop House make videos of themselves doing innocent social-media things, such as dancing to viral TikTok hits. But, really, it’s all there to drum up business for their less than innocent OnlyFans channels.
The cultural commentator Poppy Sowerby describes it as a ‘panopticon ... in which you are required to be not only constantly sexy but also constantly entertaining and likeable, given your dual role as porn star and influencer’.
It will not astonish you that bop culture has been criticised for glamorising sex work, pandering to deep misogyny, representing the logical end point of sexual permissiveness and basically creating a new form of algorithmic hell.
OnlyFans is now almost mainstream. Lily Allen claims to make more money selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than she ever did from the music industry.
You may have heard of the British OnlyFans creator Lily Phillips, who found notoriety by having sex with 100 men in 24 hours, only to have her record broken by another OnlyFans model named Bonnie Blue.
Phillips recently announced a new stunt in her bid for viral fame – she plans to visit US care homes to find her oldest ever customer. ‘I let anyone have a go – even including guys who could be my grandad or my little brother,’ she announced in a recent TikTok video.
‘What pornography does, it does in the real world; not only in the mind,’ warned the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon in her critique of porn, Only Words, in 1993. Maybe worth revisiting. Richard Godwin
