Writer and performer Melissa Todd, who worked in the sex industry while raising her son, has responded to the controversy surrounding Bonnie Blue becoming a mother, arguing that a woman who uses her body sexually is not automatically less capable of protecting a child. In an article published on September 13, 2026, Todd draws on her own experience to challenge the assumption that sex work and good motherhood are incompatible, while also stating that Bonnie Blue's latest clips featuring a baby or lifelike baby doll make her feel "icky."
From Strippergram to Sex Chatline
Todd recounts that when she discovered she was pregnant, she was working as a strippergram. According to her account, men love pregnant women, and she could probably have continued until she was nine months pregnant without protest. But when customers' first question changed from "How much for a shag?" to "When are you due?", she decided it was time to change career.
At five months pregnant, she got a job on a sex chatline instead, performing what she describes as perhaps fifty fake orgasms a day and discussing the very weirdest of kinks. She describes the work as boring and exhausting, and says she worried constantly that her baby's first words might be something explicit. At almost nine months pregnant, her phone broke halfway through a shift and she was fined for missing more than five calls in one day, which she found particularly unreasonable given that the ringer had broken from overuse. She did not protest very hard, she writes, because her throat hurt from all the fake screaming and she never wanted to hear another male voice again.
Instead, Todd spent the last week of her pregnancy sitting her university finals and not telling anyone anything. She resolved never to get on the phone again if she could possibly help it, a resolution she says she has largely kept.
Returning to Work as a Single Mother
Todd's son James arrived furious, fists clenched, a mass of blonde curls and long limbs, with her mother holding her hand as she screamed him free. Everyone said he would break a few hearts. Two weeks later, she rang her old strippergram boss and asked if there was any work. She claimed her body had snapped back into shape like magic, which was completely untrue: her belly sagged, she still had stitches, and one breast was at least three sizes bigger than the other. But she was a single mother, her little stash of cash would not last forever, and there are not many jobs you can do with a newborn.
Twenty minutes later her boss rang back and asked if she could do a job that afternoon. Todd improvised an outfit to cover her still-swollen flesh and went to perform at an 18th birthday party. One of the young men, overexcited and unaccustomed to drink, attempted to probe her newly stitched wound after she took her knickers off. She brought her fist down sharply on the top of his head, collected her money and exited in dignified silence.
Challenging Assumptions About Sex Workers and Motherhood
Todd writes that people always say your life changes forever when you have a baby, but hers did not change at all. James was an easy, amenable child, clever and obliging and patient as a cat. He would usually go to sleep as soon as they got in the car, and her mother often came along and sat beside him while Todd worked. Back home, she would wash the shaving foam off her breasts and feed him on demand until her body gradually looked like hers once more.
She argues that there is an enormous amount of nonsense talked about the bodies of sex workers and the supposed contradiction between being sexually available for work and being a safe place for a baby. Her breasts could be part of her job in the afternoon and feed her son in the evening. Her body could be something men paid to look at, touch or fantasise about while simultaneously being the place her baby felt safest.
Todd recalls one comment from a party she worked: "I'm glad that ain't my mum," one woman said, which Todd notes was an improbable circumstance given the woman was decades older than her. Todd asks why anyone would not want a sex worker for a mum, citing being warm, well-fed, well-dressed, and going on holidays and theatre trips. She says her son would never have passed age 11 if they were poor, and that poverty is debilitating and deadly.
She points out that sex workers with children have existed for as long as sex work has existed, and describes it as a terrific job for a single mother: short hours, plentiful cash, and the flexibility to fit around childcare. It is not necessarily the glamorous choice people imagine, she writes, but neither is cleaning offices at five in the morning, and we do not routinely ask cleaners whether they are fit to be parents.
What sex-working mothers do have, which other mothers perhaps do not, is the additional fear of social services. Todd says she has known women who are terrified that if somebody at their child's school discovers what they do, that information will somehow be translated into evidence that the child is in danger. But she draws a fairly obvious distinction between exposing a child to sexual activity and having a job involving sex while your child is safely elsewhere.
A Moral Line on Involving Babies in Sexual Content
Regarding Bonnie Blue's latest clips featuring a baby or lifelike baby doll, Todd states plainly: "I'll admit that makes me feel icky. I wouldn't feel comfortable involving someone incapable of consent in a sexual picture. I think that's morally unacceptable."
But for most in her industry, she argues, the greatest danger to children is often not their mother's work but the shame and stigma attached to it. James was seven when she told him she worked as a dominatrix. He was pretty uninterested. "Oh," he said, "I thought you made a lot of money for a teacher." That had been the line she had previously spun him, and given she spent most of her working days in cap and gown making old men in school uniforms write lines, it was not too far from the truth. He decided to tell his school friends she was a writer, which was also true, although she notes that was never going to afford them the lifestyle they enjoyed.
It never occurred to Todd to worry what people thought of them, and she hopes she passed on that total indifference to her son. Nowadays, he tells potential girlfriends his mother is an international porn star, and they lap up his stories. "Oh my God, your mum's so cool," they purr. He whole-heartedly agrees. Todd concludes that indifference to others' opinions is insanely cool, but adds that there are still lines that should not be crossed.
