I wouldn’t even know the first steps to take. She answered an ad for a “masseuse” but chickened out when the parlor’s owner asked her to “practice” on him. She scrolled through Craigslist ads, agreeing to a “sketchy” bikini modeling shoot when she was 14. She worked as a cashier at the children’s bookstore Books of Wonder on West 18th Street, but secretly had other ambitions. The UN School didn’t invite her back for her sophomore year because of bad grades, so she enrolled in the public Washington Irving School in Gramercy Park. Akira attends a Brazzers party in Las Vegas. “Slutty girls were my heroes, somehow glorified in my mind,” she writes.
“And I was the scholarship kid.”Īt night, she watched Howard Stern’s TV show on E! and became obsessed with the women he interviewed.
Spoiled trust-fund babies, and children of diplomats who arrived to school in black limousines with special license plates,” she writes. “I was surrounded by the Manhattan elite. She wasn’t turned on, but she was intrigued.Īngel ChevresttAkira was 13 when her family moved back stateside to Downtown Brooklyn and later Clinton Hill.īecause her grandfather had spent 45 years as a Japanese diplomat, she secured a scholarship to attend the prestigious UN School.
It was a soft-core movie based on a fairy tale. She watched her first pornographic movie during a sleepover at her friend’s house in third grade. Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” - a story of a girl’s sexual awakening, read by multitudes of young women with flashlights under their bed covers - left a “huge impression” on her. She remembers taking a book out of the library about the reproductive system when she was in first grade and asking her dad, who was clearly uncomfortable with the request, to read it to her. But part of me just doesn’t want to know.” “Once in a while I think I should go see a shrink to figure this out. “I think, ‘What’s wrong with me? What made me gravitate to this?’ I know my parents must ask themselves that,” she says. “I didn’t know what it meant, so I looked it up in the dictionary and it said something like ‘unkempt woman.’ Unkempt? I didn’t understand.” “The first time I was called a slut was in fourth or fifth grade,” she says. Still, Akira knew from an early age that she was more sexual than other girls. “Honestly, nothing happened to me that can explain all this.” “Besides the moving around, I had a really normal, happy childhood,” she says. Her family moved back to Tokyo when Akira was 9 because her father, a successful portrait photographer, was relocated there for work. “I can count on one hand the times I was ‘treated’ to dinner at McDonald’s,” she writes. They spoke Japanese at home (Akira is fluent) and were health nuts. Her mother stayed home to take care of Akira, an only child, and later returned to work in the nonprofit world.Īkira attended private preschool at Chelsea Day School. We’re not victims of rape, not drug addicts, we don’t have any daddy issues.” “Insatiable:Ībout half the women in porn have similarly “normal” life experiences before entering the industry, especially now that porn is increasingly mainstream, she says.īorn in Manhattan, Akira lived with her mother and father, both Japanese immigrants, in Soho.
“We’re feminists, very sex-positive people. “I’m part of the new era of porn,” she tells The Post. She was educated at the private United Nations International School in Manhattan. She had a “perfectly normal” childhood, with a doting stay-at-home mother and parents who have stayed together for 30 years. “There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”Īkira (a stage name) says her life story doesn’t fit most porn-star stereotypes.
I’ve become more confident, more empowered, more sure of myself than I’ve ever been,” she writes. It has “shaped me into a woman I had always hoped I would be. And in her new memoir, “Insatiable,” she’s unabashed about the love she has for the industry that has made her dreams a reality. She’s one of the richest porn stars in America, with a reported net worth of over $1.5 million. I thought, ‘What’s better than that?’ ”Īkira has since appeared in more than 300 adult movies (the names of which are too filthy to reproduce here). “I was obsessed with it,” Akira, now 28, recalls thinking when she was in middle school. Asa Akira always knew what she wanted to be when she grew up.