Are OnlyFans models the best way to explain the climate crisis?
Actor Megan Prescott has joined with Adam McKay in the hope that showing bite-size web videos of women undressing will persuade us to save the world. Will it work?
The world, as we know, is in trouble. The last three years have been the hottest ever recorded. Global emissions are still at record highs. The planet is now consistently flirting with the 1.5C limit it promised not to cross. Increasingly, it feels as if we need a genuine miracle to stop us from sleepwalking into catastrophe. Could that miracle be an environmental warning from a woman in her pants?
This is the stated desire of Headline Newds, a new series of web videos by actor Megan Prescott, film-maker Bree Essrig and “climate narrative strategist” Jessica Riches. Released through the not-for-profit Yellow Dot Studios – belonging to Adam McKay, creator of movies The Big Short and Don’t Look Up – Headline Newds is made up of bite-size videos in which the climate emergency is broken down and raunchily explained to us by a variety of OnlyFans models.
It’s an interesting trick, and one that we have seen trialled elsewhere. When McKay made The Big Short in 2015, it was a gamble. As compelling as the story was, it hinged on an understanding of mortgage-backed securities and their integration into the broader credit markets underpinning the 2008 financial crisis. And rather than risk alienating audiences with a long, boring explanation, he hired Margot Robbie to talk us through the subject while wiggling around in a bubble bath.
There is a very short logical step from that to Headline Newds. And so we have the launch episode, The Sun is Daddy, in which Prescott slowly removes her clothes while explaining that solar energy could meet our global energy demands with less land than is being used by the fossil fuel industry. Or, in her words: “Daddy is a giver.”
Obviously, provocation is the driving factor here. Indeed, the Yellow Dot website makes it clear that it fully expects its uploads to Instagram and YouTube to be removed on content grounds. Handily, the videos will also be available on OnlyFans, which is almost certainly less squeamish.
In fact, it is probably OnlyFans where Headline Newds will make the biggest impact. You’d have to imagine that most viewers on the other platforms will go into the videos armed with a basic knowledge of what they’re getting themselves into. But OnlyFans’ readership is presumably not clicking on videos expecting to find them full of eye-opening detail about the climate crisis – hopefully meaning the info about impending global collapse is likely to make an impression.
Only the one episode of Headline Newds is available now, although more will be released throughout this month. And perhaps it’s a sign of the series hedging its bets, but it maybe starts a little too broadly. After all, most people already know that solar power is a sensible energy option. It isn’t something we need explained to us.
The better news is that it improves. Coming soon is an episode called Spank Banks, in which dominatrix Eva Oh names the banks that profit most from global fossil fuel projects while simultaneously paddling the bottom of a man in a pig mask. It’s a call to action, hinting that consumer choice will be enough to persuade the banks to change direction.
Similarly, another episode sees model Sabrina Jade spin through all the ways in which the oil industry has tried to minimise its knowledge of its involvement in environmental collapse. This one is genuinely educational, despite lasting less than two minutes and containing significantly more pelvic grinding than you usually find in this sort of messaging.
Is Headline Newds a success? That depends. As a statement, clearly, it has already generated the headlines it wanted to. As a call to arms, it works fitfully, but there is room for improvement if a second run is commissioned. As a driver of change, we should probably wait and see.
Headline Newds is available via Youtube, Instagram and OnlyFans.