In a recent article in The Daily Beast, memoirist Jennie Ketcham talked about her past as a pornography actress and her struggles with sex addiction. As reported: To escape the chaos of her divorced family and feelings of neglect, Jennie Ketcham started having sex as a teenager. The high she got from male attention led to posing nude and then building a career as award-winning porn star. Sadly, behind that persona, the real Jennie was hurting, lonely and self-medicating with sex, drugs, and alcohol, and she chronicles all of this in her memoir I Am Jennie. I’m sharing parts of that article with you because I believe it’s critically important for us as parents to understand:
#1. Girls/Women can be sex addicts
#2. Girls can struggle with masturbation
#3. Life as a porn star is not always glamorous.
Here are some snippets of the interview:
Daily Beast: Your recovery process for sex addiction included not masturbating, and making a masturbation trigger list. Why was that one of your rules?
Jennie Ketcham: It’s about engaging in healthy sexual behaviors and learning how to love and exist in an intimate relationship with another human being. Because I used masturbation as a way to escape healthy, intimate relationships, it was important to take a break from it so I could work on my ability to be close to people. Like any addict, there are certain triggers that make a person want to use. It’s the same with using masturbation to escape (or get “high”). Certain things make me want to disconnect. If I can identify these things, and learn how to deal with them constructively, my recovery will progress. If I can’t, then I’ll feel like I got hit by a truck every time one of them comes along.
DB: You mention your damaged relationships with female friends, “choosing men and cock over them,” as a byproduct of your sex addiction. How have you worked on changing that?
JK: I’ve probably found the most healing from working on my ability to connect with women. In the beginning, I would actually pray each night that female friends would come into my life. Upon the suggestion of a mentor, I quit taking guys’ numbers and would only put females’ numbers in my phone. I started to make an effort to be emotionally available to the women I met at work, in 12-step meetings, yoga, etc.
DB: Some people would say that all porn stars are sex addicts; how do you respond to that?
JK: Some people would also like to say that all porn stars have been abused as children, raped, are drug addicts. Though I can’t say I knew many sober or sexually “responsible” porn stars in my eight years of adult, I also can’t say that they all use sex in the same way I did. I don’t think it’s safe to generalize about any industry or the people therein.
DB: I was impressed that you don’t show disdain for the entire porn industry, even though you distanced yourself from it and most of the people in it. How do you feel about the industry as a whole, and are you in touch with people from your porn days? Do you feel the porn industry is too easy of a lure for people who are sex addicts?
JK: I am kind of ambivalent about the industry as a whole. It was my entire life for nearly one third of my life, and I was prepared to spend the remainder of my existence filming and being filmed in pornography. I don’t think the porn industry is too easy of a lure for people who are sex addicts because for a sex addict, it could be obsessing over a girl at a coffee shop, strip clubs, beaches, a guy who smiled two seconds longer than you expected. I do, however, think that porn is too easy of an answer for women and men who are desperate for the trifecta combo of money, attention, and love—even if the money received feels dirty, the attention, unhealthy and the love, contrived. I wish there were some handout they gave you that listed all the emotional issues you may come up against as a result of selling sex for money, and maybe a little pill that you could take right when you begin your porn career that would help you stay in touch with reality. But by the time people are ready to quit, most are so tired and wounded (or confused or numb or high or dead) it’s nearly impossible to talk about it.