I Joined OnlyFans To Fight The Climate Crisis

Half of my OnlyFans inbox is men asking me if they can watch me orgasm (answer: not yet, but keep spending and we’ll see). The other half is men asking me why governments are so inept when it comes to acting on imminent climate threats.

Replying to all of these messages is time consuming. But it’s what I signed up for when I decided to join a platform known for porn to talk about the existential threats being faced by humanity; specifically, the climate crisis.

My decision to join OnlyFans feels, in some perverse way, like a hunger strike. If my body is the only thing extractive capitalism hasn’t yet taken from me, I will use it as a form of protest, for attention in a way I never anticipated when I first started working in climate communications.

My job as a narrative strategist involves understanding the stories people believe about climate change, and unfortunately many of those stories are incorrect. Even the stories about the stories are incorrect.

For example, people think that there are a huge number of people who don’t believe climate change is real, but that’s not true. Most people – 89% across 125 countries – want stronger climate action.

Climate change is a very particular comms challenge. It is something that most people in the world believe is an issue that we must prioritise solving, but that governments refuse to act on with the immediacy required.

It is a problem that impacts all of us regardless of our political belief, and a slow-moving existential threat that, psychological research shows, our brains cannot fathom, so we tend to switch off when we should be leaning in.

Even if we do get people engaged, the only solution is an immediate transition away from fossil fuels and to renewable energy – something that is achievable but presented as impossible by Big Oil corporations and the governments who are not holding them to account.

For normal people, the lack of agency leads to a general feeling of despair.

I felt like giving up on my work, until I saw Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up on Netflix back in 2021. It’s a dark satire about scientists who have infallible evidence that a meteor is coming to Earth, but are faced with a world who simply will not listen.

Watching that film was my life’s work reflected at me. If nobody is listening, how do we make them?

I did a deep dive into recent examples of effective communication to reach the masses and found myself fixated on how Trump’s voter base had been activated on a platform of fear and dissatisfaction.

I saw how the primary messages, which present more as ‘feelings’, were shared and cultivated through entertainment built upon parasocial relationships – the ones developed through long, conversational podcasts, and a presence alongside daily life on social media.

It was a new form of trust and intimacy that was incredibly effective at narrative shift.

That word – ‘intimately’ – sparked a solution. I am lucky to have genius OnlyFans friends Meg Prescott and Bree Essrig, and they have shared their experiences building sincere relationships with followers who are there for comfort and connection as much as masturbation.

It seemed absurd to think that a platform known for selling nudes could be home to climate messages, but it also seemed absurd to not try absolutely everything when our window for meaningful action is closing.

It was through another work project that I met Staci Roberts-Steele from Yellow Dot Studios, the nonprofit set up by Adam McKay. Together, we created Headline Newds, a comedy porn series made for OnlyFans.

The videos would reach people who would typically scroll past anything with “climate” or “science” in the title, through entertainment and intimate parasocial relationships.

The production – working with eight brilliant OnlyFans creators – showed me that women who know their value are the perfect people to advocate for our planet, and for everything natural and human we are trying to protect in a world being mined to make machines.

As climate narrative strategy goes, this was something completely new, and I realised that waking up the comms industry to the fact that we need new ideas was as important to me as the public response to the videos.

That’s when I decided to start my own OnlyFans account. I may not have the body or the beguiling nature of the creators we worked with, but I’d learned that OnlyFans was about so much more than boobs.

When we launched Headline Newds, I opened my OnlyFans DMs to men who wanted to talk about climate change. And I have been inundated.

Many people said the videos had taught them something new, but many more said that they were worried for the future of the planet, frustrated with their governments, but didn’t know what to do with those feelings.

No one told me to shut up and get my tits out.

Though not true for many women I know, sex work has a reputation as being the “last resort” for women who have exhausted every other option and simply must pay their rent.

There is a stigma attached to it, although in any sane world the stigma should be on the systems creating the conditions in which vast numbers of people cannot afford to live.

But this is not a sane world, which is why I joined OnlyFans as a signifier that we must try every possible “last resort” when it comes to communicating about the climate.

What this experience has shown me is not just that people are willing to engage with climate content in unexpected places, but that the problem was never a lack of care. It was a lack of connection.

For years, we’ve tried to communicate urgency through facts, fear, and authority – but attention today is built through intimacy, trust, and presence.

If the climate crisis demands that we rethink everything about how we live, it should also demand that we rethink how we speak.

Jessica Riches is a climate-focused filmmaker and narrative strategist, and co-creator of Headline Newds, a short-form series produced with Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios. She explores how attention, intimacy and unconventional storytelling can be used to engage new audiences with the climate crisis.