Asa Akira, the name that doesn’t need an introduction. Alright, maybe to some who never was a horny teenager in 00s, the one is needed. Asa Akira is a porn actress. She was in the industry for a while now, achieved a significant success and recognition by hordes of horny men both as an actress and the director. Apparently, she’s also a writer who published three novels. I happened to read one of them.
Insatiable: Porn A Love Story. That’s the name of the book that I read. Funny enough, I was recommended to read it after Gore Vidal’s The Pillar and The City. Somehow, Everand decided that if I wasn’t impressed by some good-old-Greek male friendship, I would be impressed by the memoirs of the woman who surprisingly wasn’t part of my teenage years. I mean, I knew who she was, but somehow my search history, for research purposes, obviously, never included her. Anyway, I was going to the seaside for a weekend and decided to read it. After all, Ulysses is hard, and I wanted to read something that doesn’t try to melt my brain after every second sentence. So, Asa Akira, Insatiable: Porn A Love Story. Here we go.
The novel, the book, the memoir starts with a sex scene. I don’t know whether it was intended to shock, to show how shameless the rest of the book was going to be, or Asa Akira thought it was a good way to start writing about her life. Anyway, I wasn’t impressed. Not because I’m that knowledgeable about threesomes while a bunch of dudes with camera and mics try to capture the performance, but rather because I read enough Miller and Bukowski to not be impressed by the excessive usage of brave words like cock, cunt, and pussy or graphic descriptions of copulation itself.
Unfortunately, sex, while no doubt is an interesting topic, gets really boring when there’s nothing besides it going on. That’s why I’m not a big fan of erotica, and even though I read it from time to time just to keep the fingers on the pulse of whatever I’m touching, I’m mostly bored. The first chapter was exactly that. Wow, graphic sex scene, multiple orgasms, female juices, and male yogurt all over the place. Didn’t impress me and I was already regretting that I decided to pick up this novel. Things like that happen rarely, but happen at times.
Fortunately for me, the rest of the memoir was much better because while it was about sex, it touched upon other topics. As soon as we’re done with the first chapter, Asa Akira switches the narrative and writes about her life, her childhood, her teens, her adulthood. Her experiences in adult industry, her experiences as a call-girl (escort?), as a stripper, as a junkie, you got the idea. It’s her book about her, no surprises here…
On the second thought, there’s a couple. The Letter to My Future Child is one giant what the fuck am I reading moment. Like while I’m not a prude and don’t think children should be ashamed of their parent’s profession, I still believe we should avoid creating new breeds of fuck ups. And trust me, as a former child who had enough of his own fucked up family moments (tell me who didn’t, growing up in the Eastern Europe during the 90s), I think reading a letter like that from your mom is going to leave a mark. It also didn’t age well since Asa Akira and the guy she was married to are now divorced, so… yeah.
The novel also constantly touches on the topic of feminism and how females in porn are empowering and being a whore is a position of power and pride, but I prefer not to go down that road. I’m really have nothing to say about it except of mentioning that there was this part and I read it and did not completely agree with it. I mean, again, if that’s your choice – good. Male, female doesn’t matter to me. But let’s for a second not pretend that this choice is easy and doesn’t bring life-changing consequences. And since I’ve mentioned it, I can move on.
The other surprise is when in the introduction Akira says that she’s mentally okay and had a great childhood, and then goes into what could be called as one, long drug-fueled kleptomania rush with cigarette breaks for losing virginity three times and recalling a rather disturbing story about her babysitter. At that moment, I understood that different people have very different connotations of mentally okay and great childhood. Well, maybe she did have a great childhood. I mean, when I was thirteen, all I could think of were computer games and books, and my life wasn’t very interesting back then. Not much to remember about that period of my life except that I discovered Robert Asprin and Conan the Barbarian. That was one wild summer… except it wasn’t, but in my defense, I didn’t grow in New York, alright? We didn’t have much to do in my hometown except reading, playing video games, and riding our bikes (more like bicycles, really) from one end of the town to the other.
But, back to the topic, especially since I’m about to wrap it up, it’s an interesting piece of literature mainly because you have to read about a lifestyle most people have no idea of from the person who lives it day by day. I don’t know how truthful it is, how real the numbers she mentions are, and in general, whether that’s how the industry looks from the inside for real and people really talk and behave like that all the time, but as a bystander I came up to a conclusion that you have to be built different to end up in porn. Astonishing discovery, right? Who would’ve guessed?
To conclude, it might seem that I’m criticizing Akira’s life, but I’m actually not. Lately, I’m too tired and preoccupied with my own to criticize other’s life-choices. If there’s a god, he knows I’m the last to preach. Asa Akira made her choices and ended up where she’s now, and judging from her latest Instagram posts (yep, after finishing this book, I jumped straight to my favorite part called Where are they now) she’s doing alright. Much better than most of us who sold our souls to corporate overlords for Juice Thursdays and Fruit Tuesdays, but saved our dignity. I mean, she drives a brand new Mercedes and I take a crowded metro to the office when it’s 40°C outside. Now tell me, who sucks now?