I will not be the Flame or: Is Jennie off the cock a cheap trick?

My thoughts when I heard that Penny Flame was leaving porn turned quickly from abject grief to the belief that it was all a publicity stunt. That is what porn has done to me.

Now I think the once and future Jennie Ketcham’s sincere feeling became a publicity stunt, and that basic cable fame is her enabler.

The website “Becoming Jennie,” launched within days of its domain registration last month, is a poignant blog written by someone who is well-versed in, and in love with, 12-step language, thought, and terminology like no one but someone newly in recovery can be. Or that person’s therapist.

Penny Flame joined VH-1’s “Celebrity Rehab” with “Loveline”‘s Dr. Drew Pinsky and her episodes begin airing this fall. Her addictions? Sex and substances. She joins former porn performer Kendra Jade on the show.

But where the early entries on the blog were about her retirement from porn, she has clarified in recent days that she is only retiring from directing it. She has been clear that she does not hold the adult industry accountable for her addictions, but seems to be hedging her bets by hanging around.

It is like my swearing off meth but continuing to live in San Bernardino County.

Ketcham/Flame has a successful How To series with Vivid, which happens to own PennyFlame.com. So anyone visiting “Becoming Jennie” and falling in love with the vulnerable writer thereof, wondering what that writer looks like naked, can then visit Vivid’s Penny Flame site, which is linked. Vivid’s Penny Flame site then makes much of Ketcham’s celebrity rehab. It’s like a perfect storm.

The confluence of “Becoming Jennie” and the “Celebrity Rehab”-specific PennyFlame.com leave an aftertaste of savvy cross-promotion.

It is very easy to link the launch of such a confessional, Lifetime-A-Network-for-Women website with a greater marketing scheme, and I wonder if anyone can truly recover from something if she launches a career that generates income from it. But as I say every time I see you: A girl’s gotta eat.

Here’s an example:

You: Hi Grams. What’s going on?
Me: A girl’s gotta eat.
You: What?
Me: You heard me.

I think Ketcham’s own intentions might compromise the cash cow that is Vivid/VH-1’s lock on the recovered Penny Flame, especially as Flame’s name will continue to sell videos.

Ketcham’s blog details the tricky business of celebrity recovery and its attendant meetings, whether at Sex Addicts’ Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, meetings with her commercial agent (she wants more mainstream work), her literary agent (she’s writing a book), and comedian Sam Tripoli, who features Katcham/Flame in his show at the Hollywood Improv.

For the addict recovering alone in some less glamorous place, with a less titillating (former?) job, who is no longer young and beautiful, Ketcham’s struggles might seem small. And narcissistic. But all porn girls are small and narcissistic – that is why we love them.

And it’s not as if blowing her cover is easy for Ketcham/Flame: try to tell someone who was a porn star for eight years to not giggle when someone says “meat.” Try to deal with Ketcham’s dog, who fills her apartment with poo. Try to make some transition from porn to mainstream work and see how difficult it can be (this is why I am no longer an Archbishop).

However cynically this public recovery might be viewed (how “Anonymous” is Sex Addicts Anonymous when millions of basic cable subscribers know both of her names, anyway?), I know Ketcham will handle her recovery with her trademark exuberance and fire. For her sake I just regret that, in order to recover, a sex addict must first hit her bottom.

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: My first meeting with Penny Flame; My second, better meeting with Penny Flame; Matthew, Mark, Throat, and johns; 2007 – the year Spunk’d broke; Penny Flame’s Expert Guide to Handjobs
See also: Becoming Jennie