I have deleted the Instagram App from my phone. In clearing my life of useless information (like photos of beloved family and friends, and the activities of my peers), I have found the space to devote my attention to what really matters; the Snapchat Explore page. 

 

 

Snapchat’s sad, misshapen answer to TikTok’s success, the Explore page is a strange and disorienting place. It’s like Wonderland, if the Mad Hatter spoke in a monotone, AI-generated voice, and, instead of being a hatter, made videos about Minecraft Parkour. Like Wonderland, I emerge from the Snapchat explore page confused; it is a land with its own, peculiar gravity, with foreign logic and alien customs. They worship strange gods there.

 

 

All this is to say, I am incredibly plugged into the Bop House drama. 

 

 

This is not my fault; the Snapchat Explore algorithm does not move with the vicious precision of TikTok, or Instagram. It fumbles and guesses, tossing content out blindly. There is something poignant, almost spiritual, in its consistent wrongness, its admirable and misguided persistence; one must imagine it happy. You almost expect to open the app one day and find out that it has entirely given up. It might have, had it not discovered The Bop House. 

 

 

For the uninitiated, the Bop House is a TikTok content house, comprised of young women in their early twenties and late teens, all of whom sell content on OnlyFans. For the even less initiated, OnlyFans is a site where, for a fee, customers can buy access to exclusive celebrity content, like recipes, meet-and-greets, and porn. The moniker ‘bop’ references the bobbing motion a head makes while giving a blowjob; it is a new word for slut, or whore, or tart. You might have thought that we did not need a new word for slut, or whore, or tart. You might have thought (foolishly) that our language was already replete with words like these, that our vocabulary of woman-hating was a diverse enough ecosystem without the introduction of a new species.

 

 

Clearly, you would have been wrong. 

 

 

Because the Snapchat Explore page loves The Bops. It loves them ardently, affectionately, the way an eyeless, legless dog might love a stranger who tosses it scraps. Its love is unconditional and obsessive; it does not care if they are succeeding or failing, if people are angry or happy with them, as long as it can talk about them. Before writing his 95 Theses, Martin Luther was famously wracked with religious doubt. He would spend hours in penance, prostrate before the rosary until his knees bled. This self-torturing devotion is nothing beside the conflicted ardour that the Snapchat Explore page feels towards the women of the Bop House. It is not sure if the Bops are who they say they are; it fears that they are not. Each day it works itself into paroxysms of fear that they are younger than they claim, or older than they claim, or less religious than they claim. It frets that they might have been baptised under different names, that they might not be ‘girl’s girls’, that they have ‘gone too far’. It worries, (and worries and worries) that its love is displaced, its devotion undeserved. 

 

 

It is notable that the crux of this concern hinges on the fear that the women of the Bop House are older than they purport to be, or less Christian, or not virgins. Sophie Rain, the highest earning member of the Bop House, claims to have earned US $43 million  (£32 million) in 2024 alone; she has built her ‘brand’ on the fact that she is a devout Christian, waiting for sex until marriage. In any other field, this would make her objectively useless—nobody wants a mechanic whose whole ‘thing’ is that they are morally opposed to the concept of actually touching a car. But for sex work, the lack of experience, the youngness, seems to be the point. Many of the women in the Bop House wear braces. None of the women in the Bop House are older than 24, and the youngest is 19. They talk extensively, in the podcasts that they all inexplicably have, about how childish they all look, about how massively helpful this childishness has been in allowing them to sell explicit images of their bodies.

 

 

Like all clickbait, this has been a long way of illustrating a short concept; the Bop House is really fucking creepy. I don’t mean the women in it, or even OnlyFans itself. It is a net good that there is a site that allows sex workers to do sex work without having to directly engage with pimps, or the wider porn industry, or the sort of men who pay for sex work. The vast profitability of eroticised adolescence is not, in any meaningful way, the fault of the 19 year old sex workers who perform it. The Bop House has no direct political agenda. Yet, undeniably, there is a conservativeness to the whole thing, a politics to it, almost. It is a house full of apparently sexually available young women, all of whom are very interested in seeming young, in seeming Christian, in seeming pure. 

 

 

Conservative politics has long idealised the pure, young, domestic, home-bound woman as the basis of society; the silent cog that keeps the whole machine churning, that washes the dishes and keeps the house and puts out when necessary. But conservative values of chastity and modesty have always been dogmatic beliefs, not practical ones. At the risk of agreeing with Freud, a functioning patriarchy demands its Whores, as well as its Madonnas: easy access to sexual, as well as reproductive and domestic, labour. The sexual prescriptivism of social conservatism offers a mirage of a safe, moral society, where people do what they’re supposed to do, sleep only with the people they have to sleep with. This is, and always has been, pretense, a mask. 

 

It is also, increasingly, a mask that the New Right is uninterested in maintaining. 

 

In June 2024, Hailey Welch, better known as ‘Hawk Tuah Girl’ went viral for sharing a blowjob tip in a TikTok street interview. It was normal, weird internet stuff. The video was debated and contended and assigned meaning with the sort of fervour usually reserved for Bible passages, or texts sent during breakups. People were angry and amused, and, strangely, triumphant. Trump supporters used the meme as an opportunity to manufacture, and then subsequently wear, the ugliest and worst T-shirts ever made— they read ‘Spit on that Thang’, next to a picture of Trump. They worked less to express any of the wearers’ political commitment than a commitment to being bullied, and never having sex. Twitter users lauded the clip’s ‘fundamentally conservative values’, sourced in its display of ‘a woman pleasing a man in a heterosexual relationship,’ and ‘not being bitter towards men.’ 

 

 

Ms Welch, herself, is not a reactionary ideological purist. Surprisingly. She is also not the only young woman to be co-opted, in her sexuality, into this narrative of male pleasure. When actress Sydney Sweeney wore a low-cut dress to some exclusive red carpet event, her breasts spawned countless crowing, bizarrely headlined articles like Amy Hamm’s ‘Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?’ Like the conversation around Welch, this article tracks the conventional attractiveness and apparent sexual availability of their subject to a distinctly ideological space, one in which male pleasure, and, more specifically, female subservience to that pleasure, functions as political victory. 

 

 

The sexual ideology of the New Right is a dogma that lacks the patience to fetishise female purity. It is an ideology whose dominance relies, not on the nuclear family or the small business, but on dopamine rushes, cleavage and blowjobs and young, blonde women who might maybe one day want to have sex with you. This is the misogyny of the information age; it demands access, openness, information. It asks, in comment sections and secondary school classrooms and everywhere on the Snapchat Explore page, ‘is it bubblegum pink?’ 

 

 

This question is posed in reference to a woman’s labia. Like the term ‘Bop’ itself, the phrase is a jargon of hatred, humiliation that is not immediately obviously humiliating—if you do not know what a ‘Bop’ is, or what, exactly, is supposed to be ‘bubblegum pink’, then the words are innocuous, simply words. The bite requires a mutual understanding. These terms, crucially, were developed on TikTok. Armed with an algorithm that suppresses content with ‘explicit’ or ‘unacceptable’ words, like ‘death’, or ‘sex’, or ‘lesbian’, TikTok has instead created a language that hides its meaning and its danger in its implications. 

 

 

It is no coincidence that these implications tend towards the biological; both ‘bop’ and the labia question are, despite their misdirected meaning, explicitly sexual terms. They evoke the object of female genitals, the act of sex, the motion and colour and appearance of it. They insert the speaker’s gaze into the most intimate of situations, or moments, or places; they take what is private and point it out, mock it. In short, like most misogyny, they are terms preoccupied with their subject’s biology, terms spoken to remind you that you are a person second, and a body, a cunt first. 

 

 

Most insidiously, they do so in the guise of humour. This language functions, with the shrill efficacy of a dog whistle, to say one thing while meaning another. It deflects its vileness into an imagined physicality, maintaining an insouciance that eludes censors, tricks algorithms, and allows its content to reach wider audiences, younger audiences. The audiences of the Snapchat Explore Page. 

 

 

The Snapchat Explore page is a strange land, with strange customs, and even stranger inhabitants: 13-year-olds. They are all in the grips of some radicalising pipeline or other; these vile comments are not the work of some stock misogynist, living post-divorce in their mother’s basement. They are written by children. The cruelty of the Snapchat Explore page is the snickering, insecure, well-worn cruelty of adolescence; in kinder years, this energy would probably have been spent on good, clean, local fun, like killing small animals, and bullying autistic children. But supported by algorithms, stoked into addictions and ceaselessly monetised, this childish mean-ness has spread globally, and moved fast.

 

 

So what are you to do, as a concerned, well-meaning citizen, witnessing the birth of a new right-wing resurgence during your procrastination scrolling? The world is charging, Internet first, into a new era of populist neo-fascism, and you are just looking for distraction while taking a shit. You can take the bait and fight with these angry, confused children, argue with them in the comments sections of Sophie Rain’s TikToks and the Snapchat Explore page. You could join them, if you wanted, and brainstorm new flavours of cruelty, grow fluent in the language of hate. You can write a wanky and unpublishable think piece about it, if you’re really unbearable. 

 

 

But probably it’s best to just log off. ∎

 

Words by Evie Power. Photo courtesy Lars Plougmann via Creative Commons.