Sophie Rain made forty three million dollars last year.

Earning that amount of money changed her life in ways she'd never have imagined and I'm not just talking about money. She's twenty.

She grew up on food stamps which isn't uncommon in America. Almost forty two million Americans only eat because they have food stamps according to Pew Research. We call them the working poor.

College wasn't an option so after high school she got a job in a restaurant. It didn't pay much but she brought her pay home to help her family.

Even with her income, the bills were piling up.

Her parents owed property taxes they couldn't pay. Struggling to pay the mortgage and bills and provide for the kids, nevermind property taxes on top. Leaning on food stamps to make sure the kids are fed.

People who aren't in the working poor have no idea the stress on all sides of a family who's struggling. Parents needing the kids to help, knowing every bit of help is money the kids aren't saving to better their own lives. Kids, feeling guilty for every single thing they need because they watch their parents struggling, watching mama cry over bills they can't pay.

So a friend said hey, you're really pretty, you should get on OnlyFans.

It was just supposed to be supplementary income, but then her boss at the restaurant found out and fired her. She couldn't find another job fast enough. She was looking. Applying for jobs, getting nothing.

So it was do or die. She had to make Only Fans work.

Forty three million dollars. Last year.

First thing she did was pay off all her family's bills. Paid off the mortgage. Paid off $15,000 in property taxes. Here you go, mama, don't need to worry or cry about bills anymore. Then she bought her brother his dream car.

Part of me wants to say you go girl, you take that sweet money.

Another part of me wants to smack the people who created this mess because the world is so messed up I don't think we can fix it.

You know Sophie Rain isn't her real name, yeah?

No one uses their real name if they pay the bills by taking their clothes off.

A few cold hard facts. Then back to Sophie.

The United States has more wealth inequality than any other developed nation. In the last quarter of 2024, nearly half of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. The Bank of America says one third of America spends 90% or more of their earnings on absolute necessities.

According to a Bank rate report, 59% of Americans in 2025 don't have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency. The US Dept. of Labor said they get 32,000 new unemployment claims every workday.

People losing jobs left and right.

And while half the country is struggling?

CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,322% since 1978 according to the Economic Policy Institute of America. Mid-level worker wages have gone up 11% and minimum wage hasn't gone up at all. If minimum wage went up the same percent that CEO salaries have, it would pay $47.64 per hour. Not $15.

People say minimum wage jobs are supposed to be for kids, but if that's true why are so many of them during school hours?

The wealth gap affects everyone, but it's hitting kids hardest.

Boomers and the uninformed of every generation love to say young people don't want to work but the fact is the Gen Z unemployment rate is 8.2%, which is more than double the national average of 3.5%.

Gen Z graduates are three times less likely to find a job than any generation before them. It's always been hard to be new in the workforce. Everyone wants experience but how do you get experience in the first place?

You know companies are using AI to sort resumes now, right?

Just sort for the level of experience they want.

Sort those kids right out the door.

If that's not bad enough, AI isn't just sorting resumes and deciding who gets a shot, AI is also taking entry level jobs at an increasing pace.

Only Fans to the rescue. If you're a pretty girl.

It's like the world's oldest profession, except you don't have to actually get in bed with anyone. Just take your clothes off. Men will pay.

Do you know what the Bop House is?

It's a group of girls who live together and make content for Only Fans. On TikTok they call it "spicy" content. I'll let you figure that one out.

It's an actual house. A six-bedroom, five-bath mansion overlooking Miami's Biscayne Bay. Two pools. One inside, one out. Rent is $75,000/month.

The girls split the rent. From their earnings.

Sophie was one of the founders of the Bop House. Came up with the idea and launched the Bop House with another girl. A whole house full of girls in tiny bikinis or footie pajamas. Men will like that. And they do.

You know why they called it bop house?

Because among the Gen Z crowd, if a girl has had more than one partner, boys call her a bop. Hell, if a boy *thinks* a girl has had more than one partner, they call her a bop. She only needs to look a certain way.

Funny, isn't it, that the only thing that's changed with the passage of time is the word? Ho is so millennial. Slut is so Gen-X. So the girls figured they're going to get called bops anyway, might as well leverage the inevitable.

Bop house girls are young. They usually start at eighteen or nineteen. Fresh out of school when they still have little baby faces and women's bodies.

Now they fly on private jets to basketball games, own Porsches and Lamborghinis and rack up thousands of dollars on a night out.

The Bop House girls collectively earned $250 million last year.

Their subscribers on Only Fans pay five or ten bucks a month to see paywalled photos. But that's not where the majority of the money comes from. Know where the big money is?

Private videos.

Sophie told the New York Post her best customer is a man named Charley. He paid her $4.7 million in 11 months. They video every day. He doesn't tell her personal details so she doesn't know much about him. Doesn't know how old he is or even what he does for a living.

All she knows is he's married.

In an interview with People, she said she doesn't want to know how old her private clients are because it might feel like talking to her grandpa.

Stephen Snyder MD is a New York City sex therapist. In an interview with US Weekly he said being a sexually appealing woman is one of the oldest forms of economic power of all time, but he hates seeing a young person have to turn their sexuality into a circus side show to make a living.

But that's exactly what's happening.

Here's the ugly part of this story. One of them, anyway.

OnlyFans isn't like a department store. The only way to see someone's Only Fans account is by typing in the url directly. So to get followers, the girls have to promote like crazy on social media.

Here's a couple of the tamer shots.

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screencap from Sophie's twitter

Photos like that are all over social media. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. Anywhere they can post photos, they do.

Those photos get hundreds of comments. Instantly. Thousands.

Know what the comments are? Some are men professing their love. Promising to come to OnlyFans. Some are men posting photos of themselves. Shirtless, or with their tongue sticking out.

Some are men hurling slurs.

They call her all the things you'd expect.

Some of them are cruel. They insult her body. They ask what kind of man her father is to allow his daughter to do that. They post her address for stalkers to find. One of them posted her real name and laughed.

A stunning number of comments are ridiculously young girls.

Just little girls, posting explicit photos and barely dressed close ups trying to leverage Sophie's popularity into views on their OnlyFans accounts.

Here's a fact that makes me sad.

Studies show a growing number of teens believe OnlyFans is a strong career option because they see these girls making money.

They know how hard it is to get a job. How poorly most jobs pay. And they see the Bop House girls talking about making millions on Only Fans. Sophie Rain made an instagram reel inside her private jet.

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screencap from instagram

But the truth is? It's not easier on OnlyFans than it is anywhere else.

OnlyFans has 4.19 million creators and over 80% of them are women. And roughly half are in the youngest age group. Girls like Sophie are the one percent. The average Only Fans creator earns around $180/month.

I don't even want to think about young girls taking explicit photos and putting them behind a paywall only to earn nothing. How demoralizing that must be. How it would affect their psyche and self worth.

You know what Sophie tells girls? She says if school is an option, get an education because what she's doing is really stressful and mentally demanding. Every day, making private videos, taking photos.

Earlier this year, a man broke into her house while she was home. He thought she was his wife. It went to court and he was found mentally disturbed. It was really scary, she said.

Every day, there are men standing outside The Bop House, because people keep posting the address on the internet. It takes a toll.

And every day, she worries that as she ages, rich men won't want to pay her and what options will she have, then? How do you save for a whole life when you're only twenty years old? So she pushes harder and harder, determined to get a life built that'll allow her to stop. And get out.

You know what she wants, after doing this for a couple of years?

To get out. Live on a farm. Only do this as a last resort, she says. Because you have to be so public, so everywhere, if you want to make any real money at it. And it's mentally exhausting.

"I want to have a giant farm and retire and just take care of all my animals. I'm already trying to start building my farm. I have two cows now, but I'm eventually gonna get 10." — Sophie Rain, New York Post interview

Here's maybe the saddest part of this whole story.

Because Only Fans girls need to be so visible on social media to draw their customers, it's affecting kids on social media. Because they're seeing all those hyper sexualized photos. Day after day.

Australian activist Melinda Tankard Reist shared TikToks in which she spoke to middle school girls about the Bop House. They told her in no uncertain terms how the flood of Bop House and Only Fans content on social media has changed expectations for both girls and boys.

One girl said boys today expect girls to look like OnlyFans creators.

Another girl cried that boys see girls as "ugly" if they don't fit the aesthetic they see on Bop House. There are teens who want to get plastic surgery so they look like those girls. So boys don't think they're ugly.

Dr. Emma Carlisle, a youth psychologist specializing in the impact of social media said: "this creates unrealistic beauty ideals and links self-worth to sexualization, which is incredibly damaging during formative years."

Right now the whole world is screaming to see the Epstein Files.

I want to see the list of men paying these young girls for private videos. I want to know how many of the men paying for private videos are running companies, and I want to know how much they pay their employees.

And I want to know why we've created a world where young girls think undressing for rich men is their best career option. Because it shouldn't be, and if kids think that, we need to look at how we've done them wrong.

For more stories about how pornography, social media, and income inequality hurt women and girls, follow Fourth Wave. Have you got a story or poem that focuses on women or other targeted groups? Submit to the Wave!