She wasn’t around for long, but Penny Flame was a delight to watch on-screen. Cute as a button, smart, funny, and super-sexy, she quickly became one of my favorite porn stars, and I’m not the type to seek out a movie purely based on its actors. So imagine my chagrin when I found out that she had quit the porn industry this past spring! Don’t feel too bad for me — she left for good reasons, has a refreshingly positive attitude about the industry, and has a bright and intriguing future ahead of her.
As she says in an interesting and inspiring interview with Violet Blue:
I hate the common exit strategy, hate that girls join the ‘god squad’ or feel ashamed of the choices they made but I understand it. I can see that it’s much easier to say ‘porn did this to me, or that’ but at the end of the day, we are all responsible for the choices we make. I chose to be a porn star. Now I’m choosing not to be. It’s the beautifully terrible thing about free will: we can do whatever we like but we must be held accountable for whatever we do.
It was only after reading this that I realized that I’d never heard an ex-porn star NOT blame the industry for her (or his) problems. How remarkable! Apparently Penny is now going by her given name, Jennie Ketchum, and she has started an emotionally honest and engaging blog called Becoming Jennie. Definitely worth checking out.
So the world loses a charming porn star. I’m over it. I respect her choices, but even more, I respect her taking responsibility for these choices. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of Jennie Ketchum in the public sphere, and I’m interested to see what she does next.
