2 Thursday November 25 2021 | the timestimes2
As students are given safety advice for
the sex industry and the BBC’s Showtrial
features an undergraduate with an
X-rated sideline, one woman tells Julia
Llewellyn Smith about why she did it
N
ear universal horror
greeted the news
that Durham
University was going
to back safety
training for students
who support
themselves through
university with sex work. The MP
Diane Abbott tweeted: “Sex work is
degrading, dangerous and exploitative.
Uni should have nothing to do with it.”
Simultaneously the BBC launched
its new drama Showtrial, featuring
Talitha (aka Lady Tease), a plummy-
voiced Bristol student who falls out
with a friend over her side hustle as a
sex worker, after being accused of
“enabling predators”. Parents who had
prepped their daughters for top
universities so that they might end up
in lucrative careers wondered how it
could all go so wrong.
But Melissa Todd understands
precisely why students might be
attracted to the sex trade. In the 1990s
she studied hard at her Essex
comprehensive to win a place at
Balliol College, Oxford — alma mater
of Boris Johnson — to read politics,
philosophy and economics. But within
weeks of arriving she decided she’d
made a mistake.
“I was intensely shy and if you don’t
come from privilege you’re going to
struggle at Oxford because you need
to be terribly confident to argue every
week with a learned old professor,” she
says. “I didn’t realise that being clever
wasn’t enough to get you past decades
of breeding and social polish.
“I’d spent so much time and energy
trying to get there, to find it wasn’t
what I’d hoped made me depressed
and tearful.” By the end of the first
year she was so miserable the college
agreed she should take a year off.
Needing to support herself, she saw
an ad for “dancers” at the legendary
Windmill in Soho and ended up
working there as a stripper with other
students. “There were several from
Goldsmiths [part of the University of
London] in particular. I just loved it
and didn’t want to go back to Oxford,”
Todd says. “One year out became two
years out and I thought, ‘Hang on, I’m
happy and fulfilled, why would I do
anything else?’ ”
The mousy student discovered she
thrived when disrobing for strangers.
“I love being on stage,” she says. “You
feel in charge of your own image and
you perhaps don’t when you’re being
attacked in a tutorial. If you’re up
there and the lights are on you, it’s all
about you and I just can’t get enough
attention. It’s a mental illness really, I
should have had therapy, but that
would have been too expensive.”
Today, aged 45, after stints in strip
clubs, working sex phone lines and as
a strippagram, Todd is a dominatrix
who canes men for £100 an hour, witha thriving sideline in online porn. “I
can’t say I regret leaving Oxford, if
anything I wish I’d got into the sex
trade sooner. It’s the most wonderful
job in the world,” she says. “It’s great
for self-esteem and it’s just fun. I’ve
had so many exciting adventures. I get
to travel everywhere — Americans
love my posh voice. I go to lots of
parties and I meet interesting
celebrities I can’t tell you about. I get
presents every day. I feel blessed.”
Todd’s very far from the brassy
stereotype you might expect. She’s
talking to me on Zoom from her house
in Thanet, Kent, a wall of well-
thumbed books behind her and a cat
wandering in and out of shot. With her
neat bob, demure outfit and tones of a
Pathé newsreader — the result of
elocution lessons she invested in in
her twenties “to put me in the class my
brain warranted”, you might assume
she was the civil servant she originally
aimed to be. “But I would have been
rubbish at that, I’m not very good at
following rules.”
Her playwright husband was
“horrified” when she told him about
her job shortly after they met seven
years ago. “It’s really not his vibe at all.
He’s the last person you’d ever
imagine would marry a porn star and
it’s taken him a little while to get his
head around it.” Now, however, he
tolerates clients clumping through the
house all day, although if they bump
into each other both men are
“mortified. But he’s a playwright and
somebody’s got to make some money.”
Her 20-year-old son has known
what she does since childhood and
finds it “hysterical. He’s even worked
with me on a couple of [porn]
shoots, he’s very good.” Todd’s mother
not only was happy with her
daughter’s career but for a while
joined her. “She was made redundant
in her sixties and saw how much I was
making. We used to do mother/
daughter sessions together. She was
good at role play.”
Now Todd has written a novel —
she admits it is “basically a memoir,
but I wanted to hide behind another
character because I’m quite boring”.
My Body Is My Business documents
her career in sex work, in the hope of
debunking some myths.
“Attitudes to sex workers have
changed for the worse in the last few
years and I wanted to get my story out
there, because it seems to be different
from the usual one of pathetic victims
and a terrible blot on society. It can
just be fun as well. Women in
particular get very cross with me for
not fulfilling their expectations that I’ll
be desperate for them to rescue me
and pity me. They tell me I’m
privileged, I’m not like trafficked
women who are kidnapped and raped
and so on, which is of course true. But
I don’t think my story is any lessT
his week Stella
Creasy, the
Labour MP, was
told she had
broken
parliamentary
rules by
bringing her
three-month-old son, whom
she is breastfeeding, to a
Commons debate. She had, she
was informed, broken the rules
on “behaviour and courtesies”.
I had thought Keeping The
Next Generation Alive was,
perhaps, one of the greatest
courtesies you can extend.
Hey, I’m exhausted, I’m
leaking, I’m feverish, I’m
ravenous, I’m sleep-deprived, I
smell of Edam gone bad and he’s
grown little teeth like tiny
daggers, but I’m keeping the
human race going here! It is, I had
thought, possibly an even greater
courtesy than giving up your seat
on public transport to an older
person, particularly as no one
does that any more. (Younger
people, what’s the problem? Get
up! We kept you alive, with your
tiny teeth like daggers, now this?)
But I am wrong, obviously. So
shame on you, Ms Creasy, for
Keeping The Next Generation
Alive. In fact, Ms Creasy, if you
are going to insist on Keeping
The Next Generation Alive, how
about never leaving the house?
Keeping the Next Generation
Alive in public? That’s just going
to distress and worry folk. I know,
I know, breasts are on show every
day in some newspapers. But this
is key: are those breasts, in that
instance, being employed to Keep
The Next Generation Alive? I
think you’ll find not. And it’s fine.
If they’re not. That’s tickety-boo.Keep it sexual, lady! I’m amazed I
even have to tell you this.
Breastfeeding. It’s just one of
those things that has to be
shrouded in secrecy, with a literal
shroud, probably, in the darkest
corner of some room, or while
freezing on a back step, but if
you’re going to leave the house,
what did you expect? Setting up a
new human with a lifetime of
health isn’t something you should
ever bandy about. If the milk
came from a cow, say, and
somehow got inside the woman,
that would be OK. Heavily
processed bovine fluids, they don’t
make anyone uncomfortable. But
breast milk? That’s between you,
baby and the dagger teeth. This is
a Keeping The Next Generation
Alive matter, remember, so:
shhhhhh. And now here are my
tips on how to breastfeed without
upsetting anyone:
6 Seriously, you should probably
never leave the house. Even if
you’re an elected official working
within a plainly absurd system
that offers no maternity cover soif you don’t do your job no
one does your job and your
constituents will not have
representation? Yes, even
then. Imprison yourself
within the home and let
the men run everything. It’s
what mothers have done
for generations.
6 If you are fearless, and
do venture from the house,
where you have been going
mad while smelling of
Edam gone bad, and bravely
visit a café, request
somewhere “discreet” where
you might do the Keeping
The Next Generation Alive
thing. The freezing back
steps are an option, as is the store
cupboard. Many a mother has
precariously sat on that mop
bucket before you. It’s just a
completely natural part of the
completely natural process of
being humiliated in this way.
6 Trains and planes. Really? OK,
leave your seat, make for the
(blocked) toilet, lock yourself
inside. Try not to touch any
surface or register the block or
just how sticky everything is.
Jiggle baby while remaining in an
upright position. Keep baby
horizontal to the nursing side
while ricocheting off the walls
and wishing you were dead.
Remind yourself what’s at stake
here: no one should ever have to
witness Keeping The Next
Generation Alive.
6 Lastly, if you do happen to
be an MP, my best advice is this:
find a nice profitable company,
become their consultant, put it
on the register of interests, and
milk it for all the money you
can. It’s only milking for milk
that’s verboten.I miss the
Midlands
motel
yesterday. It was on at
teatime when I was
growing up and my
sisters and I watched
assiduously, as did so
many (15 million
viewers, on average). I
remember Meg and Jill
and Sandy and dashing
David Hunter (coloured
shirts, white collars —
so suave!) and Jim
Baines, and Benny and
his woolly hat, and
Amy Turtle, who may
have been Amy
Turtleovsky, a Russian
spy, although what
secrets she hoped to
pick up in a Midlands
motel were never
divulged. Did
information on
nuclear warheads passthrough Kings Oak?
I remember the
wobbly sets and wobbly
plots — didn’t Miss
Diane have a secret
baby she kept in a
chalet drawer at one
point? — and Doris
Luke and whoever it
was Audrey from
Coronation Street used
to play, and Shughie
McFee, the chef, who
was eventually written
out but no one went to
the bother of actually
writing him out. He
went to look for pork
chops in the freezer
one day and was never
seen again. I once
interviewed Tony
Adams, who played
smooth Adam Chance,who was written out,
but invited back after a
year without any
storyline whatsoever: “I
reappeared as casually
as I’d disappeared.”
But my favourite,
favourite, favourite
moment was when Meg
and Jill were having a
heart-to-heart, and you
couldn’t hear a single
thing they said because
Miss Diane was
hoovering at the same
time, and they couldn’t
reshoot, as they only
ever did one take. It
later transpired that
Miss Diane had
misread the script. She
was meant to be
“hovering in the
background”. Terrific.The writer Russell T
Davies’s next TV drama
is Nolly, a biopic of
Noele Gordon, who
played Meg Mortimer
in the soap Crossroads
and was a fabulously
difficult, imperious
woman, by all accounts.
I can’t wait. Indeed, I
can remember
Crossroads — which
was, of course, the
inspiration for Victoria
Wood’s Acorn Antiques
— as if it wereDeborah Ross
Publicly keeping the
next generation alive!
Shame on you, Stella
Sex work while