How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
"Rock Her World: The Sex Guide for the Modern Man" comes out today, and its author is certainly some kind of expert. He's Adam Glasser (aka Seymore Butts), a '90s porn icon, who, in his prime, stuck to a very specific theme and pumped hundreds of films into the no-frills "gonzo" genre. With curly hair, bronzed skin and one of those cocky smiles that bears no subtext beyond "I crush ass on a daily basis," Glasser is like Matthew McConaughey with more shirt and less pants.
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In the preface, Glasser claims he wrote the book because he has been solicited for advice about male performance "tens of thousands of times." And let's face it fellas: It's the 21st century. Time to buck up and be a cocksman.
"It didn't take me long to figure out that 2+2=69, and there was a need for a book like this," Glasser writes. His math speaks volumes about the work as a whole.
Much of his advice is useful, some of it is absurdly misguided (not to mention sexist), and all of it would need to be rephrased in front of your girlfriend. "You will learn to eat pussy like a gourmet," Glasser promises, and he indeed delivers, providing succinct, illustrated instructions on that topic and much more. He is definitely the right teacher for the "modern man," who is apparently 14 years old. (And no, gay dudes, the term doesn't apply to you — look at the hot chick on the cover! Keep out!)
But then, in nearly every chapter, the book veers toward the autobiographical, becoming the scrawled confessional of a veteran fuck-cyborg who uses the same pseudonym Bart Simpson used to make prank phone calls. Glasser has many anecdotes to share, which appear like old-fashioned movie flashbacks or introspective Romantic poetry. "Writing about this brings back memories of the first finger in my anus," he reflects. He tells us about his first Asian hooker ("No poo-poo sex!" she cried), his first high school threesome and his first nearly everything else, as well as the ins and outs of the industry where he made his name.
Glasser writes in a joke-laden, extremely conversational style, which might be problematic if you approach his tome begging for sagely wisdom of the flesh. Most of the illustrations are more like comics, and he loves using exclamation points to make various points: "I don't know about you, but I don't want anyone experimenting on my schmeckle!"
Sure, he has plenty of experience, but so much of the writing is detached from the advice itself, instead producing ad hominem responses like sympathy, voyeurism and dude-bro solidarity. And this, I think, is a problem not unique to Seymore Butts in his newly minted sensei role.
Self-help literature has its wisdom, but it's also modeling for the sake of modeling — designed, therefore, to establish your relationship with the "expert" by any means necessary. I don't want to be bros with Seymore Butts, soulmates with Deepak Chopra or baking BFFs with Rachael Ray. But the rhetoric is in place, the illusion is compellingly airbrushed — like that woman on the cover — and sometimes it's hard to resist.
