Sep 5, 2014 2:30 PM PDT    Text size: 

NEW YORK — The New York Times’ Fashion & Style web section today published a first-person piece by adult entertainment star Kayden Kross.

The porn actress’ essay is called “For Kayden Kross, the Family Business Happens to Be Porn,” and discusses about her rise to fame to her current life as a mother and fiancee to adult performer Manuel Ferrara.

Kross tells the tale of growing up and setting financial and long-term goals, as well as earning an associates degree and transferring to Sacramento State. But after getting close to a degree that didn’t interest her and seeing a gloomy economy on the horizon, college began looking less like the ticket to financial security, she said.

"When the housing market plunged, I felt trapped. I did, that is, until one slow Friday night at work when a man dropped $30 in my lap to hear him out. The next week I was on a plane for Los Angeles," Kross wrote.

Kross, who discusses the virtues and turbulence of modern love in the piece, first met Ferrara on her first porn shoot at age 21.  

"Manuel sat next to me and introduced himself. He had a French accent and a thick mess of dark hair," she said in the essay. "'We’ll be working together,' he said, an innocuous comment under normal circumstances but a loaded one when the work is porn."

The two matched like two peas in a pod, but Kross admitted that "navigating love when both of our jobs involve having sex with other people can be stressful."

She noted that Ferrara became jealous and moody in the days before shoots.

"He knew it wasn’t fair to ask me to stop, but he couldn’t hide the way he felt. Finally he said he wanted me to quit my contract and move in with him, with the logical next steps being marriage and children. I was 27," she wrote.

Kross admits in the essay she gave up a lucrative contract, although she continues to perform on occasion, though only with Ferrara or with other women. But, she says, she still makes a good living.

"Yes, it’s a double standard that Manuel gets to perform with other women while I don’t with other men, just as it’s a double standard that he still works full time while I have cut back," she wrote. "But I am the mother of an infant daughter, and caring for her is my priority right now, just as providing for us as best he can is Manuel’s priority. In the end, our calculation isn’t so different from the choice millions of other working couples face these days."