The Bop House was divided to begin with. Or so they said online.
None of the members of this content creator collective ever says much else really. Based on the videos they post, some of them seem to never even speak. They instead offer a daily churn of mirror selfies, Brandy Melville–esque loungewear shoots, and TikTok dances. Each member is a beauty in her own right: The only feature they share is that they all look young. All of this is the appeal, simple as it sounds. Gorgeous girls who look like teenagers and act like them too. Oh, and they each have an OnlyFans.
That is really the Bop House’s whole bit. I could stop the story here—is there anything really all that new to say about why men might like a 20-ish-year-old bouncing around in a bikini top and booty shorts? Is it really all that confusing, too, that these girls allegedly are making several million a year in the process? What about the fact that half their following is teenage girls who want to be them?
Taking the lead from TikTok content creator “houses” in the early years of the app, the Bop House is a collective of women who have joined together to help one another’s social platforms grow, to make content, and, most important, to make money. The most prominent among its members is Sophie Rain, who, as of mid-September, has 7.9 million followers on Instagram. The other girls are all close behind: There’s Aishah Sofey, with 2.5 million; Summer Iris, with 3.6; Alina Rose, with 4.8; Ava Reyes, with 4.1; and Julia Filippo, who started as an assistant to the other members, with 1 million followers. As of late, however, there’s been drama: former member Camilla Araujo left over the summer, Sophie is retiring in the fall, and one member is allegedly pregnant. Again, or so they say online.
The Bop House is in a neighborhood in Miami seemingly not meant for cars or people. One could argue this applies to Miami writ large, but in Brickell, it’s particularly apparent. Sidewalks are closed to build towers for residents who will not be able to walk between them. You press the crosswalk button and the privilege to safely venture from point A to point B just never comes, so you look both ways and run in hopes that a Maserati doesn’t come around a corner doing 90. There is at least one major pedestrian street, populated by restaurants with names like Sexy Fish. Salt Bae’s steakhouse is around the corner. Dining out on the patios, women gently rock strollers containing small dogs.
The evening before my visit to the Bop House, the gender war–focused podcast Fresh and Fit had set up a live stream right outside of a Capital One Café. There, host Myron Gaines sat behind a table draped in white beside a large red sign reading “Bring back slut-shaming. Prove me wrong.” His choice of live streaming location is, by most odds, a coincidence. He did not choose Brickell because it is the location of the Bop House; rather, he chose Brickell because it is the location of bops. A bop is a hoe, a thot, a promiscuous woman in either appearance or action who likely benefits in some capacity from male attention. The etymology is irrelevant and largely incomprehensible. Maybe it came from a song. Maybe it refers to a woman who “bops” from man to man. Maybe it refers to these girls who bop around in their undies in front of a camera.
It is for all these reasons, at least, that the women of the Bop House have selected Brickell as their “home” and thus “reclaimed” the term. I use quotes for both because both are dubious: None of the women of the Bop House actually live in the three-story penthouse in reference, nor do they really seem to care much about redefining the term in a more empowering sense, à la the SlutWalk rallies of the 2010s. But maybe there is still a reclamation in the idea of these women leaning into a term that many young men would call them anyway, repurposing it with humor, and making an absolute fuck ton of money off it. What is empowerment, anyway? A feeling about ourselves? The way other people look at you? Or is it several commas in your bank account?
I arrived at the Bop House at noon, which might as well be 6 a.m. for some of its members. Up several dozen floors in an elevator, down a sleek hallway, and behind double doors, two of the Bop girls stood in the foyer, using an entryway table and large round mirror to do their makeup. Beside them, a massive photo book rests on a stand, opened to a black-and-white photo of Dr. Dre and Eminem. White gloves sit atop it for those who might wish to flip through without oiling the pages.
“Hi, thank you so much for coming!” They are polite and expectant as they dab powder beneath their eyes and line their lips in pink. These two, Rain, 21, and Filippo, 23, must be the early birds of the group. Sophie, I’m told by her manager, wakes up at 8 a.m. every day and arrives at the Bop House that day almost entirely ready to go. As I turn the corner, the penthouse unfolds before me. A gray leather circular sofa marks the center of the room, surrounded by windows spanning the three floors of the unit. Beside the sofa, leaning against the glass and stone stairwell, are three marquee letters as tall as the girls: BOP.
To the left of the living area is a dining table, where another two Bop girls sit with their portable light-up mirrors and the contents of their makeup bags dispersed. Accompanying them are several different varieties of Starbucks beverages, some coffee-based, others more of a strawberry sweet treat. Scattered among them is a minimum of eight iPhones—each member of the Bop House, of course, has more than one phone.
The Bop House, I quickly learn, is not a Bop Home. They do not have a strainer or more than one knife. Their manager, Joseph, 24, has been renting the penthouse for months but managed to get the stovetop working only last week. Forget about the oven. The place looks like an Airbnb, albeit probably the most expensive one in Miami, and is lived in like it. A few people sleep in the beds there most nights, namely Joseph and the Bop House’s assistants, but that is much of the extent of its functions as a house. Instead, the property known as the Bop House is better interpreted as a set, a filming location in which the actors known as the Bop House girls can play out their respective roles.
When I sit down at the dining table with Joseph, the first thing he tells me is that he’s always had a talent for manipulating the masses. He’s run several viral accounts on Instagram and X, most dedicated to reposting other people’s content. Today, he owns several accounts with followings in the several millions, but he does not run them personally. Ditto for the Bop House girls’ accounts. He has a bit more of a hands-on approach with their socials, but their OnlyFans pages are a different story. He estimates that there are around 500 people globally working for them, chatting with customers, and uploading carefully worded pay-per-view videos strategized to entice men into thinking they might see nudity. But here’s the rub: They never will. And that is perhaps Joseph’s most successful manipulation of all.
Yes, the most shocking aspect of all this—the girls, the money, their online personas—is that they aren’t even showing nips. They’d probably like you to believe they do, though. Or, at least, that maybe one day they will. “The moment you’ve been waiting for,” they write in Instagram story teasers. “FULLY NUDE AVAILABLE,” it says in their OnlyFans bios. Is it a bait and switch? Well, yeah, probably. What are you going to do, though? Call your bank and say that Sophie Rain didn’t show as much of her breasts as you anticipated? Whatever you hoped to see from the Bop House girls was just that, a hope.
“I’m very modest,” Rain tells me on a white leather couch in a room off to the side of the Bop House penthouse where maybe someone occasionally watches television. “I know with my content, the most naked I get is lingerie. I don’t take anything off. I don’t do any nudity or anything. I’m still a virgin.”
That itself is part of the fantasy, obviously. The virgin with a naughty side, a girl with unlimited sexual opportunity before her. It’s clear what men might fetishize about that. All the girls, though they may or may not be virgins, describe their content similarly: While they face pressure to increase the explicitness of their content, they—and, notably, Joseph—are firm in their commitment. Some have even done nude or topless content in the past, prior to joining the Bop House, and have since reestablished their boundaries. For example, before the pandemic, Alina Rose, 25, worked as a stripper, a job that she returned home from each night in tears. And as Summer Iris, 25 (though the Internet says she’s a few years younger) tells me, she first started doing OnlyFans on her own before signing with a management company that told her they wouldn’t sign her unless she did topless content. A year and a half ago, however, she reestablished her boundary of not doing any nude content. In that sense, working with Joseph and the rest of the Bop House has been something of a dream come true.
“I’ve never wanted to fully take my clothes off,” says Summer Iris. “It’s just like a personal boundary. I’m Christian, too, so this job at the end of the day, it’s already kind of a moral gray area, like it feels wrong. So I want to keep it as tame and as wholesome and correct as I possibly can.”
Summer Iris also has concerns with how their ages and youth are marketed. Many of the girls are a few years older than their OnlyFans bios might claim, and a few of them have braces. For Summer Iris, braces were her first major purchase when she finally had the money to afford them. Still, she’s often accused of having gotten them in order to look younger, and she’s aware that there may be men who sexualize her for them.
“I don’t really smile in my pictures with teeth as much anymore,” she says.
But as with the sexual fantasies of youth and innocence that the Bop House elicits from men, many of the Bop House have found that their work has brought out an audience with a different set of desires of their own.
“A lot of our audience, unfortunately, is teenage girls,” says Summer Iris. “I don’t want any teenage girl to aspire to do content when they grow older. I can speak for myself, because I went through it, but I think everyone should grow up first, go to college, or if you don’t want to go to college, do something else and try to figure out your life before you jump into this sort of content.” Summer Iris has a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience. She had planned to pursue a master’s degree before she became so popular on social media. Now she worries that her online visibility would make it difficult for her to receive the letters of recommendation necessary to apply to graduate school. “I never, ever thought it would get to this point,” she says. “I thought I would stay a small creator.”
Like others in the Bop House, Summer Iris seems to have somewhat of a complicated relationship with the entire business. “A lot of girls go into it when they’re freshly 18, and it’s a lot more harmful than you think,” she says. She also has reservations about the fact that they promote how much money they make, though that is often what makes them go viral.
“You kind of have to do it, but then it creates this ideation in a lot of these girls’ heads that they could be rich and they can make a lot of money just like us, that they just have to do content like us, that they just have to sell their bodies online,” she says. “But that’s just not the truth. We all got very, very, very lucky. We’re a very small percentage of girls who are doing sex work, who are successful, and especially this kind of tame sex work.”
Every single one of the Bop House women I spoke to, in some form or another, said that making OnlyFans content was their least favorite part of their job. They love their friendships with each other, they love making fun dancing videos, they love live streaming or gaming on Twitch or podcasting, but none of them particularly enjoy the part of the gig that requires them to put on lingerie and take pictures alone in their room. It’s worth it, of course, but they do not actually like it. “I feel like everybody should do whatever they want, but I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right to me,” Alina Rose says. “I’m not even a sexual person.”
But, naturally, who likes every part of their job? It’s fine not to. Still, it’s something that each wanted to highlight: Who they are on-screen, in the Bop House, in this interview, may not be the person that they are at home. “I’ve had to completely disassociate from my work persona,” Summer Iris says. “I have to constantly remind myself that, like, I’m not Summer, and what these people think of Summer shouldn’t affect me to the extent that it does.”
Rain, meanwhile, spends most of her personal time running a small farm with two cows in the outskirts of Tampa. “I’m literally Hannah Montana,” she jokes. She hopes one day to retire from OnlyFans and social media entirely, instead focusing her attention on making her farm self-sustaining.
Of course, Rain knows that she’d likely never be able to live out this dream (a good farm costs a lot of money) were it not for her success on OnlyFans. For each of the girls, this life is their own version of a rags-to-riches story: There is essentially no other path accessible to them that would allow for the financial growth they’ve experienced. No amount of education or plain hard work allows a waitress to become a multimillionaire in a matter of years—not without some luck, some strategy, and some well-utilized good looks.
“It’s really nice to be young and be able to see the world and not be kept in the box that capitalism would be putting us into,” Summer Iris says.
The Bop House makes it all seem so easy: Here’s your ticket out. They’ve managed to become this famous, this successful, this rich in a sexual marketplace that seems increasingly dictated by Bonnie Blue thousand-man stunts and the threat of AI girlfriends. Any fantasy can be fulfilled, if only digitally. But even when the stakes are constantly rising and there’s unlimited hours of hardcore porn catered to every niche, there remains some enduring appeal about a group of real-life, flesh-and-blood college-aged girls performing a choreographed dance. Millions of men will pay to see it. And millions of girls will want to be it.
As I prepare to leave, I recall some of what Gaines had been arguing outside of the Bop House building the night before. A small crowd surrounded him, with one middle-aged man at a mic trying to engage in the topic at hand. “No matter how fat, ugly, or annoying a female is, she will still find a simp for her,” Gaines says as his opponent tries to argue that men and women alike will organically match with people of a similar caliber. The opponent makes the argument that a man of lower social status could meet a woman who works at, say, Denny’s or Waffle House. “That girl that’s at the Waffle House isn’t going to go for him because that girl at the Waffle House has access to men that are millionaires via Instagram,” Gaines says. Gaines is engaging in the same type of fantasy: that any girl at all could be afforded this life of luxury, so long as she knows how to use Instagram.
“Are we getting a yacht tomorrow?” the girls ask Joseph as they change into cheeky black bathing suits for a photo shoot in their rooftop pool. “I have to be at church at noon,” Rain reminds them.
