Melissa Todd’s mum didn’t just accept her daughter’s career as a dominatrix.
She took it up herself at 61, and promptly made more money than her.
A family business, run from the family home
Melissa, who has worked in professional domination for around 20 years, was already seeing clients at her mother’s house when her mum lost her job a few years short of state pension age.
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The next step, apparently, picked itself.
“I got (Mum) into it when she was 61, she went on to her mid 70s,” Melissa told the Option One Podcast, presented by Babestation, as reported by Creatorzine.
“I was using her house anyway to see clients and she got made redundant. So she thought, oh no, I’ll do that as well.”
Her mum, who has asked not to be named, turned out to be a natural.
“She was amazing. She was better than me,” Melissa said.
“She made more money than me as well. It was really annoying.”
From PPE at Oxford to the strip club
Long before any of this, Melissa won a place at the University of Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics.
The degree gave the country David Cameron and Ed Miliband. It kept Melissa for exactly one year.
“I hated Oxford, I went mad and dropped out after a year,” she said.
“I became a stripper instead, which was the right thing to do.”
She stripped for around 12 years before moving into domination.
Pearls, paddles and pictures of the grandkids
As Miss Matthews, Melissa plays a strict 1950s-style headmistress.
She wears pearls and stockings, scolds badly behaved adults and dishes out punishment with canes and paddles.
Her clients are not quite who you’d picture.
Many are pensioners, and they spend a surprising amount of their hour on something far tamer.
“Well, you’ll normally see pensioners,” she said.
“There’s a lot of chat and they like to show me pictures of their grandchildren. So it ends up being about 15 to 20 minutes of spanking.”
She charges about £150 an hour and insists that’s a bargain.
“Oh, I’m really cheap. Actually, people always say I should put my prices up.”
She keeps them low on purpose.
“It almost feels like a public service,” she said.
“Which I know sounds ridiculous but often I do see pensioners, and they scrimp and save for months to be able to see me.”
Not every client draws a pension. “I’ve got quite a lot of police officers as clients. I do get politicians as well,” she said.
So she ended up around politicians after all. Just not in Westminster.
The butler who flies in from California
One devoted client travels from California to spend a week as her personal butler.
He takes her to the theatre and to expensive restaurants, holds her coat and brings her martinis in bed.
“He accompanies me to the theatre every night, and he takes me for posh dinners and things and takes my coat and stands up when I stand up,” she said.
Asked whether he foots the bill, Melissa didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, yes. Handsomely. And pays me too. It’s really fun.”
Miss Matthews takes the stage
Melissa recently appeared on ITV’s Nobody’s Fool, hosted by Danny Dyer and Emily Atack, and now has the character in stand-up.
Her show, Gag Writer, sees Miss Matthews telling stories from the job and telling off the audience.
Front-row tickets presumably sell last.
Why it matters
Melissa has spent two decades building one character, and that character now works across a podcast, a primetime ITV show and a live comedy tour.
For adult performers, that’s the template: a persona strong enough to travel.
Her business model runs the other way from most of the creator economy too.
Fewer clients, lower prices, and loyalty strong enough to cross the Atlantic.
Adult performers increasingly use podcasts and comedy stages to reach mainstream audiences, and older women are carving out some of the most loyal followings in the industry.
Melissa sees no sign of slowing down. “The older I get, obviously, the better I get at it,” she said.
“They like older women, so it’s a job for life.”
Her mum kept going until her mid-70s. Melissa has a while yet.
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