Insatiable: Porn –  A Love Story by Asa Akira

A Super-Id Book Report

Reading a book review these days requires you to have a Masters of Fine Arts in English and Critical Thinking. The review is harder to read and comprehend than the book itself. Inspired by the countless book reports we (and you) had to do all through elementary and high school, The Super-Id is reviewing books the old school book report way.

The first Book Report book is porn star come [pun most definitely intended!] author Asa Akira’s Insatiable: Porn – A Love Story. Although the book was released last year, the paperback edition has just been released, and we found it a perfect time to revisit the book and explore Asa Akira [albeit not the preferable way we’d like to explore her, but we are beggars…]. Plus we are already fans of her accomplishments in her daytime career with her work in the back, side, and doggystyle positions.

Full Disclosure: I met Asa Akira a couple of years ago. We chatted for a few. She was wearing a RUN DMC t-shirt and had ripped it all up and I chastised her for being sacrilegious to the Kings. We then discussed the West Vill and the best pizza spots in NYC since we’re both from there. And that was it. I felt guilty for bogarting her time as there was a crowd of guys waiting for her autograph. She didn’t even ask my name. Haven’t seen or spoken since. #JustSayin’ 

Title: Insatiable: Porn – A Love Story

Author: Asa Akira

Publication Information: Grove Press, 2014

Genre: Biography / Memoir

Main Characters: Asa Akira, Asa Akira’s Asahole, Asa Akira’s Vagine, Asa Akira’s Mouth, Asa Akira’s Mom & Dad, Toni Ribas (Asa Akira’s Husband), Mark Spiegler (Asa Akira’s Agent), the Spiegler Girls (Asa Akira’s Quasi-sorority sisters), various random porn folk, NYC & LA denizens, and such.

Story Setting: Present Day, Flashbacks to various periods of Asa Akira’s past

Official Blurb: Asa Akira (28) has already had an extremely unusual life. Educated at the United Nations International School in Manhattan, she soon was earning a good living by stripping and working as a dominatrix at a sex dungeon. Akira has now built up a reputation for being of the most popular, hardworking, and extreme actors in the business, winning dozens of awards for her 330+ movies, including her #1 bestselling series “Asa Akira Is Insatiable”.

In Insatiable, Akira recounts her extraordinary life in chapters that are hilarious, shocking, and touching. In a wry, conversational tone, she talks about her experiences shoplifting and doing drugs while in school, her relationship with other porn stars (she is married to one) and with the industry at large, and her beliefs about women and sexuality. Insatiable is filled with Akira’s unusual and often highly amusing anecdotes, including her visit to a New Hampshire sex shop run by a mother and son.

In a world where porn is increasingly becoming part of the mainstream, Akira is one of very few articulate voices writing from the inside. She something important, controversial, and astonishingly interesting to say about sex and its central role in our culture.

Personal Summary: Insatiable: Porn – A Love Story is a memoir that details the strange, fascinating, sad, humorous, and provocative life of a young Japanese girl living in New York City who grows up to be the biggest porn star in the world who gets paid to have sex. Despite the saturation of porn in pop culture and society, the porn industry has never been able to lift the veil of taboo that surrounds the industry and its inhabitants. Asa Akira’s Insatiable: Porn – A Love Story adroitly tosses the cloak aside and reveals how one individual navigates, champions, and ultimately makes the best of the beast of an industry.

Thoughts on the book: I thoroughly enjoyed this book and this comes from someone who typically doesn’t like to read about the lives of people unless they are dead or can somehow instill knowledge upon me to make me a better person (or make more money). This book does neither, but it does manage to make you do something critical in the consumption of media content – it makes you care. The stereotypical (for a reason) image of the girl next door who was molested by her father and sexually assaulted by the babysitter and gang-raped by the football team and becomes the high school slut (although Akira did become the high school slut without all that previously mentioned personal damage done to her) and starts turning tricks as she dances topless at the seedy bar a couple of towns over, which eventually leads her into doing porn that involves lesbians, shooting objects out of her anus and then inserting all sorts of objects into her anus as she mulls when, not if, she will do interracial with a man whose penis resembles vegetation found in organic farms. Yeah… that’s not Asa Akira’s story. She’s the chick you went to high school with that was cool as fuck, that you wanted to fuck, and quite possibly ended up fucking, simply because she likes to fuck. Sometimes it’s just that simple and so is Asa Akira. She is quite simple – she really likes sex and has forged a career rooted in that love. Isn’t that what we are all encouraged to do? Yet if it involves sex – shame! With her adventures, misadventures, and shenanigans, Insatiable reveals all the blemishes of a young woman and an industry without the parcel of shame and embarrassment that is typically the accompaniment. And that makes for a powerful woman, a powerful story, and a powerful book.

What was your favorite part of the book? The haikus, maybe. I remember having to write haikus in English class during elementary school and they were the bane of my existence, but Asa Akira is gifted beyond being really, really good at having sex – she is a Twitter assassin and she is a grandmaster haiku writer.

Squirted on the floor.
Now I have to clean it up
On my knees again.

The books isn’t a straight biography from A-Z, rather it’s chapters that are vignettes into Akira’s life and times, which makes her incredible journey more palatable for the weak of heart or the ways-of-porn ignorant. Selecting one part of the book means selecting one vignette that stands out amongst the rest, and I’m not confident I can say that.

I will go on to say that my favorite part of the book was the honesty.

What was your least favorite part of the book? The lack of pictures… nude pictures to be incredibly specific.

The parts dealing with the gay boyfriend and dominatrix stuff and gloryholes aren’t exactly the tags I click on when looking at free porn online. [Please note: I don’t have a problem with gay or BDSM, they both just don’t happen to be my thing, just like bologna and celfies. No knock to those that do all four of these things.]

What was the most interesting thing you learned from a book? You can smoke crack and not become a $2 hoe. Nancy Regan and New Jack City hammered the point home that if you smoked crack, you would turn tricks for $2 and apparently $2 is enough to buy more crack, thus creating a vicious cycle of smoking crack and smoking wood. Asa Akira smoked crack and didn’t turn tricks (although she did turn tricks at one point, but it wasn’t because of smoking crack – you’re gonna have to read about it). Instead she went on to become a super successful porn star with more money in the bank than me (and most of y’all reading this). The hell you know, Nancy Reagan!

Since I never, ever gave a second thought behind the people who are involved in porn besides the porn act itself, I learned that porn people are people too. They aren’t just there simply for my carnal desires, but they have complex lives just like the rest of us. Not sure if that ruins the whole fantasy appeal of porn, but it’s nice to know.

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[intense_blockquote color=”primary” font_color=”#ffffff” border_color=”#000000″ width=”100%”]“At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, almost every time I shot a sex scene, I fall a little bit in love.” [/intense_blockquote]

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Notable/Quotable Passages:

• There’s no “i” in “blowbang.”
• I was twelve years old when I discovered I didn’t have to pay for things in order to own them.
• The whole reason I got into porn in the first place was for the sex.
• It would be another year before I got sober, but that was the last time I smoked crack.
• Rule number one as a working girl: Bring. Fucking. Condoms. We weren’t even there yet, and I already had one strike in the hooker game.
• At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, almost every time I shot a sex scene, I fall a little bit in love.
• Not to be outdone, another girl exclaimed, “But have you ever done double anal? I can pretty much fit anything back there now.”

Analysis & Evaluation: Asa Akira is a talent. I know… she does porn. How much talent do you need to do porn? Look beyond the skin and the surface and understand that Akira is a voice and an entertainer. Whether it’s with her body, her tweets, or her words, she commands and captivates her audience (a male and female audience, mind you…) with varied offerings. Beauty, sexuality, humor, insight, honesty, and self-deprecation are the toolkits she uses to make a very natural thing (sex) in a taboo world (the porn industry) palatable to a mainstream audience (pop culture). Whether she is a feminist as some female-centric sites have dubbed her, or just an attention-whore who puts every fabric of her life on display for the consumption of others, she is undoubtedly a strong, unique voice that deserves all the attention she longs for and is understandably getting right now.

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Absolutely. It’s a fun, quick read of a new and powerful voice in pop culture. Plus she curses a lot and has lots and lots of sex talk. There is a wealth of random porn-related knowledge peppered throughout the book that can be useful for you to share at the next cocktail party (e.g., a blowbang often employs blowbang guys who are significantly cheaper than A-list male performers, and occupy the bottom of the male porn totem pole below A-, B-, and C-listers. [Reality stars would be blowbang guys in porn]).

I can see Asa Akira and her story on television (big screen TV, not your mobile device or home computer with the volume turned all the way down low so no one can hear but you) as the new coming of age tale for young, empowered women. I’m sure her agent or a producer whose read the book has had meetings with HBO, Showtime, and Netflix, and told them that Asa Akira has come into her own and Insatiable: Porn – A Love Story is a money shot.