LAST UPDATE | 10 hrs ago

“OKAY, IT’S CLEAR from what you’re telling me that the porn industry is targeting us boys on every gaming, video-sharing and social media platform we use – YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, X. But what about you girls? Are you being targeted in the same way?”

The second-year class I’m teaching goes unusually quiet; they’re stumped. They can’t think of anything. Then one girl asks: “You mean like the bop house girls?” She’s 13.

A wave of recognition and realisation moves through the girls. They all know who the bop house girls are, but are only now realising the insidious nature of their presence on their social media feeds.

Most of the boys, me included, are clueless. “Who are the bop house girls?” we ask. Immediately, I see from the girls’ faces that this is one of those things that they’ve all seen, but at their age are far too young and embarrassed to be able to explain to the rest of us. One of the braver girls makes eye contact and quietly tells me, “Just look them up.”

So I did.

Ask a teen or tween on social media who the “bop house girls” are, and many would be able to tell you: they are a group of young women living together in a porn production mansion in Florida, creating two types of material. One is “get ready with me” videos, dance trend reels and makeup tutorials on TikTok for their teen female followers. The other is sexually explicit content for paying subscribers on OnlyFans.

A few months ago, L’Oreal-owned make-up brand Urban Decay launched its “Battle the Bland” campaign in an apparent effort to engage the next generation of young women and girls. To do so, they hired the hugely successful OnlyFans model and pornographic content creator Ari Kystya as their new brand ambassador. It seems to me that their idea was to hire a “sex worker” (Ari’s words), shake up the industry and make a splash. But it didn’t. It was barely reported on.

Let’s be really clear, this is not about being anti-sex. This is not about shaming Ari Kystya or anyone else for how they choose to make money with their bodies. This is about L’Oreal, one of the biggest beauty manufacturers in the world, partnering with a creator associated with the adult content industry in a way that I would argue may contribute to the normalisation and glamourisation of that content to young audiences on social media.

So, what’s the problem? With over 4.9 million social media followers, Ari Kytsya, a self-proclaimed ‘sex worker’ who sells virtual sexual interactions for money through the online platform OnlyFans, already has a significant online relationship with millions of young women.

Apart from her explicit content on OnlyFans, the 24-year-old influencer also produces the kind of TikTok videos that end up on the feeds of teenage girls – day-in-the-life vlogs, Q&As,........

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