Editor’s Note: This is the first in a two part interview.
Porn tycoon, director, producer, and on-screen legend Seymore Butts, AKA Adam Glasser, sat down with WHACK! mag staffer Miss Lagsalot to discuss his upcoming book, Rock Her World: The Sex Guide for the Modern Man. It was a meeting of two formidable, filthy minds…
WHACK! Well, so, I read your book, Rock Her World: The Sex Guide for the Modern Man, which is coming out this Thursday, November 12.
Seymore Butts Really? The whole thing?
W! Yeah, I finished it on the subway last night. I really, really enjoyed it.
SB Well thanks, that’s good to hear. A lot of people I’ve done interviews with have done them before they’ve actually received the book. It’s kinda crazy but whatever.
W! I was really interested in the whole thing because I’ve been researching all kinds of facts and statistics on sex on my own lately, and I actually found a lot of them in your book. So that was really fun, like, “Wow, I have a lot to talk about with him!”
SB You know, it was a little challenging. To be honest with you, the book was probably double the size before we had to make some cuts so to speak. But I tried to make it as broad and big-brush strokes as possible, and still give people the details they actually need to make the information useful.
W! Yeah I definitely got that out of it.
SB It was a little bit tough in that respect. It was challenging and I’m glad that you enjoyed it. I mean that’s really why I wrote it. And the fact that you’re a female and that you enjoyed it is even better. You know truthfully I’m not necessarily speaking to females. I think that there’s a lot that females could get out of the book, and I think that there’s a lot that a female can get out of giving the book to her partner…
W! Yeah I’m thinking about it!
SB That being said, it’s nice to hear that you enjoyed it.
W! I did. It’s very readable, very accessible. You don’t get into any weird science-y talk, and there’s not any high-minded kind of feminist, PC talk, which always makes it more difficult to get into a book.
SB Good, well, I mean, in absolute honesty, I can’t say that I’ve ever really read a sex instruction manual, so I’m not necessarily familiar. And I specifically didn’t want to start reading them before I wrote this because I didn’t want to tainted in a way. So I just stayed away from all that stuff. You know I get so many letters from people that it was fairly easy choosing the topics to speak about. It wasn’t easy narrowing them down to fit them all into the book, but it was easy finding the topics because all I had to do was refer to the mail and e-mails I’ve received over the years from men and women.
W! That’s really interesting. I keep hearing that from people who are in the adult industry that they get questions and people looking for advice. I don’t’ think that I would think of that on my own.
SB Well who would you think to go to, I mean, nowadays? Who are you gonna write to, Doctor Ruth?
W! That’s a good point.
SB That’s the thing. The misnomer, so to speak, is that anybody in the sex industry is automatically a sex expert. Because the truth is that there isn’t a movie that I could pick that I would say, “Watch this. This is the way you should be doing it.” There’s so much circus act sex and misogynistic sex, and that’s just not necessarily the way it is [in real life]. And to be honest I have met very few male porn performers let’s say that know how to eat pussy.
W! Oh, I know! It’s so theatrical the way they do it in movies. I’m watching and I’m thinking, “That doesn’t look like it feels very good at all.”
SB Yeah, I mean, it’s just crazy. To get a guy to keep his head down there for more than five minutes without wanting to stick it in already, is very hard to do. I mean, I think that there are some people who would probably be really good sources for information, for example Nina Hartley, somebody of that ilk, Christy Canyon. But then again there are others who people ask [for advice] who probably shouldn’t be asked.
W! I read on your Twitter that it’s supposed to be a big feature at Barnes and Noble for the holidays season?
SB Well what I said was it’s getting front of store placement. You know, on Twitter you just have 140 characters, so it’s kind of limited. But you know how they have bins that they put at the front of the store, like racks, during the holiday season? I was told that we will be on one of those front-of-the-store racks. That’s really what I meant by it. I don’t want to give it anything more. I don’t think it’s going to be in the window.
W! (laughing) Why not? Seriously.
SB I mean, I would love it to be, but I just don’t think it’s going to be in the window. And I also wonder, for example, if people who are book reviewers but not like you who are so used to the sex industry, I wonder if they’re going to have the same reaction to the book as you do.
W! That’s a good point. That’ll be interesting to find out.
SB It’s just like, what’s the lady going to think who reviews books for the New York Times who just finished the new Dan Brown book?
W! Well you never know. People can sometimes be more open-minded than you think.
SB Oh I know, I mean I’m sure some people will surprise me. They told me at my publisher that there’s a middle aged woman who’d been there for many years who’s one of the proofreaders. And that she never, in meetings, discusses any particular books, per se. But in one meeting when my book came up she said that she loved reading it, which was really surprising to them because she never really mentioned books or her opinions. So that was kind of cool.
W! Yeah, I think personally it might catch a lot of people by surprise because just like I said before, it’s very readable. Even if you’re a person who’s maybe a little more conservative, the information is presented very matter-of-factly. It’s down to earth, it’s just like “Here’s what you need to know,” and I think it might be difficult to find a problem with that.
SB Yeah, we’ll see. I mean like you said, time will tell.
W! So how did you decide to write a book in the first place? Was it mostly the letters you received from fans asking for advice, or did you decide that at some point in your life you wanted to write a book and now’s the time?
SB I think it’s a combination of both of those things actually. In almost a selfish way I felt like instead of having to answer these letters individually for the rest of my life, I could just say to everyone who wrote me and asked a question: “Hey, it’s in the book.” So from that perspective it was going to save me a lot of typing time.
But actually I don’t know, because now that I’ve been through the process of writing a book… I don’t know, I literally hand wrote a thousand pages or so of stuff before it actually became a book.
And then, the other part of the equation was that I’ve always envisioned writing a book or books, plural. And in thinking about how to start or where to approach it, I thought the best way to approach a new endeavor like becoming an author would be to start with something that I know. And that would be the most impactful and the easiest to sell to a publisher. It was a choice between that and my memoir, and I felt like my memoir still has some stuff to go, so I felt like I’d start with the sex instruction guide.
Now, whether or not there’s a call for a sex instruction guide written to women from my perspective, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s a memoir, or maybe it’s even my perspective on being a single parent and my detailing of a seven-year custody battle that I went through. I mean there’s a couple choices that I have to follow up on. I’m also interested in writing… To be honest I have a probably 70-page manuscript that I’m just kind of waiting to send out when I’m done promoting this book. It’s a sci-fi kind of adventure/sex story. It’s almost a graphic novel, but it’s also a novel graphic because there’s more text than graphics, but there’s a lot of graphics.
W! Wow that sounds really fun. I’ll read that!
SB Yeah, tentatively titled “Intercourse with an Alien.” […]
W! So along the lines of you possibly writing a memoir, I realized that in the book there are a whole lot of your stories but there’s not a whole lot of background on like how you grew up or what your details were.
SB Yeah, I was saving that. I really picked and chose. I tried to keep the stories that I included in this book relational to the topics, and I stayed away from things that might still be interesting but which I could use better at another time. My childhood, my first sexual experiences, and many of my experiences are not included in this book. You know, I’m 45 years old and I’ve been sexually active since I was very young. You can imagine, considering where I’ve grown up and the industry I became involved in, I have quite a few stories.
W! That was actually something I wanted to bring up. The stories in the book are, well, they’re ridiculous. They’re the kind of thing that most people who know you or who are in the industry probably wouldn’t blink too much about. But I feel like somebody who just picks up the book might have two questions, which I want to ask you: One, what is it about you that gets you into these insane situations you’re telling us about in the book? And, two, what would you say to someone who called bullshit on you and said you’re embellishing or making these up?
SB Well, I mean… No. There’s no reason for me to make this stuff up. I mean, I guess that’s happened with every book, right, people calling bullshit? I mean, I couldn’t find you the woman whose Chihuahua bit me in the balls. I’d have no idea where to look. But for example, there’s a story about Sophie Dee and the inflatable butt plug, right?
W! (laughing) Yeah.
SB I mean Sophie would obviously, I mean I don’t know if she’d be proud to admit it, but she would say that, yes, that happened. Because it did. And as far as what is it about me… I mean what’s so crazy? I had a lot of sex as a teenager, and I don’t think that that’s necessarily crazy. A lot of teenagers have a lot of sex. And I think that the more opportunities you have, the more opportunities you have for things to go wrong. Like catching venereal warts. And yeah, the wart thing, that was messed up. Because we really were going to Palm Springs, and yeah, the only reason for going to Palm Springs was to get laid! I mean, we really had to get rid of those warts! And I really forgot to tell my friend that you have to wash [the medicine] off. And if you look up the medicine—I don’t know if they still treat it the same way—but if you look it up you’ll see that that kind of medicine needs to be washed off within eight hours. And again, the guy whose penis it was, I used his real name because he’s deceased. A lot of names I changed in the book because I didn’t want to embarrass people, but he actually died in jail so I felt like I could use his name, and he wouldn’t mind.
W! Yeah probably not. Sounds like he probably had a pretty good sense of humor.
SB Right. So you know, that was just a long answer to a really easy question, but I mean, I’m just a guy and I had a very curious mind about sex. And that curiosity sometimes got me into some strange situations. And other things were… I mean, there’s many people who’ve had anal sex and there’s been an accident.
W! (laughing) I’m sure!
SB Mine just happened to be in the Taco Bell bathroom.
W! It seems particularly appropriate, you know. I’m sure a lot of really terrible things have happened in Taco Bell bathrooms.
SB Yeah you’d think! Most people just don’t want to talk about it. Most people aren’t going to admit that they have venereal warts and that they had to go get medicine.
W! I actually wanted to mention that I really liked the tone of the book. I got the feeling that you are writing for very much the same demographic as I am, which is basically guys who watch a lot of porn who don’t always know what to do with a real woman. And that’s definitely who I write for, so that’s what I got out of it. But how would you describe your target demographic?
SB Well, from my perspective I tried to write a book that would speak to every man. Except for somebody like me, or somebody with a lot of sexual experience who’s done a lot of observing, as well. Not only have I had a lot of sexual experiences, but because of my job, I have the benefit of observing people having sex in person. You know, before it’s all cut up and glorified and perfect. I see it as it’s happening in the raw, and in the raw it’s not anything like the finished product. For example, I know that the guys aren’t holding their erections for an hour straight, even though the scene you just watched was an hour of him plugging a girl. I know that there were breaks in between and that he struggled to keep his hard-on and that he had to do this or that, or she had to do this or that to help him get hard. You can learn a lot by watching people, and you can especially learn a lot by watching people have sex. You learn what not to do as well as what to do. And it’s difficult to speak about women in general because all women are different. That was such a challenge for me as well.
W! And you definitely reiterated that a lot in the book. I appreciated that very much.
SB I think men forget that. I think that’s easily forgotten. It’s easy for a guy to just stick with what was successful [before] instead of having to try to figure out anew puzzle. Until somebody tells him, ‘Hey that’s not working for me,’ or if he has the intuition on his own to see that it’s not working. Most guys just aren’t thinking about that.
W! Right, and for some guys, if they find out that something isn’t working for that person, the y then think it’s their fault. It can be taken very personally instead of just taken as the way it is because this woman is different.
SB And in the book I talk to guys and I say that in the bedroom when you’re naked and having sex or about to have sex is probably not the place to bring up a problem that you have with her in regards to your sex. Except of course, like I mention, if her teeth are scraping your skin off your penis while she’s giving you head, well yeah, you probably want to say something right then, in a nice way. But other than that, you probably want to wait until you’re both in a good mood in a neutral setting and able to have a nice conversation. And along with whatever it is that you’re about to tell her that bothers you, you better be prepared with some things to let her know about that you are happy with.
W! A man who could do that right would be ‘dynosexual,’ correct?
SB Correct!
W! Tell us a little bit about the ‘dynosexual,’ this new term of yours.
SB Well you know, it’s a guy who cares and puts in the effort, and has the knowledge and the desire to satisfy his partner. And if doesn’t have it, then he makes it. That’s it in a nutshell. In a tongue-in-cheek way, I kind of break down metrosexuals, restrosexuals, and dynosexuals. And I was just looking for a term that would kind of encompass my book as a whole, which is using your head a little bit, just thinking and observing and paying attention and listening. Those are all things that men might not think are that important, but they really are. And all those kinds of things make a man different than most men. And that kind of man should have his own term, and in my opinion that term is dynosexual.
PART TWO FEATURED IN NEXT WEEK’S ISSUE OF WHACK!. TUNE BACK IN NEXT MONDAY TO HEAR SEYMORE BUTTS ON FEMALE EJACULATION AND MORE!
— Interview conducted by staph degenerate, Miss Lagsalot