Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn Paperback – 14 Jul 2012

I really wanted to love this book. Sex at Dawn, the work this one is based on, struck me as being overly one-sided, going too far to paint our species as promiscuous (perhaps strategically so). I had hoped that this would be the one that struck a balance between the "standard narrative" and Ryan's polyamory.

However, most of Dusk is simply a reiteration of the standard narrative and even at times a dogmatic upholding of tradition, even going so far as to imply that monogamy is how societies advance. Perhaps so, but this is obviously not the fair, balanced take on the subject of human evolution that I had hoped for.

It took me a week to read Dawn and two months to read Dusk because Saxon's writing style is a little tough to read. I would need to re-read whole paragraphs a number of times to get at the heart of the matter, and often the arguments were non-linear, disconnected, or poorly and falsely interpreted. A number of her arguments actually bolster Ryan's case and an even greater number prove nothing in either direction, though much of the discussion is quite relevant and effective to her goals. At the very least, all of the subject matter is interesting -- it's sex, after all!

My big problem is with the straw man she evokes, saying Dawn promotes everyone sleeping with everyone or old men sleeping with young women in incestuous groups (p. 308). It's an unfair portrayal of Ryan's social-bonding hypothesis and utter disregard for the social and emotional architecture that men and women own. She immerses her rebuttal in biology, rather than sociality, where Ryan's thesis lives, thus missing the point entirely. Additionally, her analysis shows a misunderstanding of the mismatch between modern society and the ancestral environment, an important caveat to any interpretation. Saxon's tone reveals itself to protect women and tradition, which led me to suspect religious dogmatism or at least status quo traditionalism, though this is only a guess.

I did appreciate much of the scientific presentation, which is plentiful, painstakingly accurate, and relevant. Though interpreted poorly on some accounts, there are a number of important points she makes about human sexuality. Many times, she corrects Ryan's errors and interpretations by digging deeply into the same resources he used himself. In many cases, she furthers the discourse. The scientific underpinning in this work is truly impressive, but the reader must be wary of what the science means in the big picture.

I recommend this book to those who have a sharp eye for science and argument, an interest in human sexuality, and a willingness to wade through the muddy language of this book. Dusk is a excellent pairing with Dawn simply because both of the books take extreme sides and readers will naturally find themselves landing somewhere in the middle. And, of course, this subject is important to everyone's life, to say the least.

I support Sex at Dawn's agenda, but I can't support the deceptive methods it goes about arguing for it. Sex at Dusk doesn't give the authors of Sex at Dawn enough benefit of the doubt. Saxon sometimes assumes that Ryan and Jetha are making arguments that they're not actually making. This leads her to sometimes criticize them on areas she actually agrees with them. Dawn is a much more entertaining read, but Dusk is far more rigorous in its arguments - after all, it's arguments are based on the arguments made by all evolutionary biologists.

Dawn strikes me as a pop science book for a scientific theory that hasn't been scientifically argued yet. Dawn argues against a straw man version of the "standard narrative", without ever explaining why the "standard narrative" is standard. Dawn scoffs at ideas about "mixed strategies", without explaining what that means. Evolutionary biology is not a simple subject, and Dawn glosses over a lot of the complexities that get in the way of its arguments.

Sex at Dusk does a much better job of keeping its political motivations from interfering with making a scientific argument - though there are still some clear political motivations. Dawn comes from the perspective of sex-positive feminism, and is promoting polyamory (an agenda I agree with). Dusk comes from the feminist view that men and women are different, but that women should still be respected as women.

Dusk really lays bare how Dawn takes quotes out of context, and misrepresents the views of various academics. By the end, I don't think I can really trust anything Ryan or Jetha say. Some of the misrepresentations were so blatant they blew me away. Dusk also explains all the evidence and reasoning for why scientists say humans are a monogamous species with some polygynous tendencies, even with all the cheating. It's hard not to come out the other side feeling like Dawn tried to pull the wool over my eyes. Dawn met so perfectly with my own social views that I wanted to believe it. However, I believe in the scientific pursuit of truth more than getting talking points to back up my own agenda. (For example, the E.O. Wilson quote, "All that we can surmise of humankind's genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as a means for procreation," was about homosexuality in the context of bonding emotions developed for monogamy. Dawn never mentions that.)

Dusk points out that Dawn fails to explain a lot of things - a lot of really important things. Why are there so many monogamous species outside of primates that are very intelligent, but so few promiscuous ones? How could promiscuity and paternity uncertainty lead to paternal investment in children with there is no example of that in any other species, and when all examples of paternal child rearing come from polygynous and especially monogamous species? If sex evolved to be pro-social because it was so important to our evolution, why are we capable of jealousy at all - specifically, why are women so capable of jealousy when females in non-monogamous species display little to no jealousy? How can we assume that our close hominid ancestors were so similar to bonobos, but not chimps, when we're equally related to both? How can we assume that our ancestors were like either, when we've had 6 million years of separate evolution for both us and bonobos to evolve into completely separate species? How can women's sexual moans be to attract more men, when it's been shown that that's not why chimps or bonobos make noises during sex? How can monogamy be an artificial byproduct of agricultural societies, when every hunter-gather society - even partible paternity ones - show some form of publicly acknowledged pairing between two individuals, and do not 100% raise children collectively? How is Dawn's argument better than the argument that humans have extra-pair sex and serial monogamy like most other observed monogamous species?

Even if all of this is just misunderstanding on the part of Ryan and Jetha, it's so extensive and egregious that I'd have to worry about the general quality of their academic work. Some of their arguments focus too much on female promiscuity, to the point that it seems they're ignoring a woman's right to say "no" in their effort to give women the right to say "yes". (In our current culture, I think women have less ability to say "no" than "yes".) Dusk argues that early in our evolution, female mate choice - i.e. the ability to divorce a bad mate - was crucial in the evolution of bonding emotions in men. In the societies Ryan and Jetha posit, there's little focus on female choice (which means the denial of some men's libidos) and more focus on female promiscuity. Most promiscuous species are actually stupid, because they're competing with their genitals, and not their brains. When females get to consciously choose their partners, they can pick the smart and trustworthy ones, not the ones with the best testicles.

This doesn't mean we evolved with "marriage". Marriage is a social construct. However, even without marriage, we'd still be pairing off, falling in love, and getting jealous, and breaking up: it's what we evolved to do. This doesn't mean polyamory is impossible or bad, but it does mean that for the majority of people overcoming jealousy is harder than just a little cultural reprogramming.

That said, Saxon misrepresents some of their arguments. Dusk makes too many assumptions whenever Dawn fails to make its arguments completely explicit. When Dawn says hunter gatherers knew their various mates "all their lives," it's hyperbolic. What it means is that, from the time females entered their new clan group, they knew everyone else in the group all their (remaining) lives. This is more clear in talks Ryan gives. Saxon also sees the amount of effort Dawn puts into arguing for female sexual availability and acceptance for male promiscuity, and makes an assumption that Dawn only really cares about liberating men from sexual constraints, which she rightly points out is not revolutionary given humanity's ancient history of polygyny. She says that if they were arguing that men should disregard the paternity of the children that they're raising, children their wife has had with other men, then that would be something. The thing is, Dawn does argue that most of human history was marked by the communal raising of children and the disregard for paternity.

I like Dawn's motivations, but I disagree with it's misrepresentations and weak arguments. Dusk fails to give Dawn the benefit of the doubt, but otherwise is more scientifically accurate. I think the real problem is that Dawn tries to justify polyamory by making it seem natural. Dusk points out that true polyamory - multiple unrelated men and women, raising each other's children together without regard for paternity - isn't natural, it's revolutionary. Polyamory, at it's best, isn't about random sex, it's about extending the social and emotional benefits of monogamy to multiple people. Maybe we should stop trying to shoehorn nature into our modern ethical and political systems, and accept that what we're doing is new. Nature is full of violence and rape, maybe doing something new isn't such a bad thing after all.

Like many people, I found out about Sex at Dusk through Sex at Dawn. I am always interested when a groundbreaking work receives an impassioned response, such as author Lynn Saxon’s feeling it necessary to write a whole book to rebut a pop-science text. She was so offended by Ryan and Jetha’s study, Sex At Dawn, that she had to refute it page by page, which is itself an amazing thing. I felt I should read her work too, to have an understanding of the other point of view on the topic.

Unfortunately, Saxon’s work is tedious and repetitive. The worst part of it is that I cannot even tell you what her primary thesis is, other than “Ryan and Jetha are wrong.” No, actually, even that’s not it, because much of Saxon’s documentation supports the material in Sex At Dawn. She give myriad examples of the absence of monogamy in human and animal groups around the world.

Saxon claims that Sex At Dawn is “bad science” and she feels compelled to disabuse us all of the perceived fallacies therein. Where Ryan and Jetha suggest that human behavior is generally more sexual, like the bonobo, rather than violent like the chimpanzee, Saxon takes offense; she argues instead that humans are more like chimps, or more like gorillas, or occasionally more like baboons, but not possibly like bonobos. Ryan and Jetha’s thesis that monogamy may not be the only legitimate (let alone historically ideal) relationship form, Saxon denies it on the grounds that only a monogamous pair-bond of the sort ubiquitously adhered to in every hunter-gatherer society in all of human history could have built the peaceful, harmonious western civilization in which we live. She then goes on to give multiple examples of infidelity, polygyny, promiscuity, and forced copulation as though these were all a part of the monogamous foundation. It makes me think she does not actually understand what the word “monogamous” means.

Further, Sex at Dusk devolves into a misogynistic rant (particularly in chapter four), in which she repeatedly states that all women are whores. The woman’s primary role in the pair bond, Saxon posits, is to give a man sex in exchange for food. And to raise children, because men don’t care about children. (And she admits any man will do, in the food exchange. This hypothetical woman has to hide the sex if the man is not her monogamously paired mate, so the mate won’t beat her and murder the other man, because that’s what men do.) She has no objection to the thesis that humans are apes (she explicitly calls humans “chimps,” also in chapter 4), except when she wants to believe that we are somehow higher.

Saxon is herself not a scientist, at least not one with a university degree. I am perfectly willing to accept that she is a self-taught “scientist” (lay scientist, pseudo-scientist) through dedicated, self-directed study, but she does not adhere to the rigor of true scientific analysis. She criticizes Ryan and Jetha for extrapolating and hypothesizing, yet does the same herself; she sets up straw-man challenges (paraphrasing: “Because Ryan and Jetha do not discuss evolution at length, they must not understand it”); she argues from authority (herself, Darwin, and Bernard Chapais, as though they could never be wrong); she makes ad hominem attacks at Ryan and Jetha (particularly with repeated claims that they “mock” Charles Darwin for simply pointing out subsequent refinements in knowledge; but also the claim that evolutionary psychology is not a legitimate field; and hinting that they are in favor of gang rape); a few non-sequiturs (e.g., fat-free mass distribution, and long digressions about bird sexuality—she seems to have a fixation on mallard penises); and selective reasoning (paraphrasing: “the Siriono are barbaric so they don’t count”). She does not seem to understand the concept of generalization, or distribution on a bell curve. To Saxon, behavior and characteristics must be all or nothing.

Saxon also criticized Ryan and Jetha for the light tone of their book, even though hers is punctuated with snide comments. The most disagreeable part of Sex at Dusk, however, is the subtle message that not only is the amateur Lynn Saxon smarter than Drs. Ryan and Jetha, she is smarter than you, the reader. Ultimately, the message I took from reading Sex at Dusk was Saxon saying, “Look at me, I wrote a book about a popular book! Now give me a contract to write more!”

I would not bother.

The stated goal of the book was to criticize "Sex at Dawn". And it does so fairly convincingly. In fact, for a book with such specific attack target, this one was rather balanced.

One of the typical trick here is to take quote from "Sex at Dawn", and then give a slightly bigger quote from the same source. And it changes the meaning very much. It also goes to great length explaining that behaviour depends on environment, and explains the environment that different tribes live in. So this is a solid work.

The writing style is somewhat unstable. Sometimes, it's informative and entertaining. Sometimes, it's technical and hard to read. In one chapter, after discussion of 10 different tribes, I had to skip over 10 more. Maybe, this is because the book is self-published, and therefore was probably not read by a professional editor.

Finally, I am not sure I've learned much. That is, the book succeeded in convincing me that "Sex at Dawn" is pure fiction, but after reading both of those books, I wonder if it would be better reading neither. I appreciate all the details in this book and work that went into it, but not much of that is relevant to general public like myself.

In Sex at Dusk, Lynn Saxon does a superb job of weaving together an enormous array of facts from the fields of evolutionary biology, primatology and cultural anthropolgy to provide the reader with insights into the origins of human sexual behavior. In so doing, she absolutely demolishes the underpinnings of Christopher Ryan's Sex at Dawn. While I very much enjoyed Christopher Ryan's rapier wit exhibited in Sex at Dawn, my gut told me that his conclusions were not tenable. Saxon provides the intellectual substance that confiirms my gut reaction, and she delivers in a way that is accessible to the non-scientist.
I am a graduate student in Human Sexuality, and am one of those "sex-positve" people who would love to believe in Ryan's utopian view of sexuality. But I must concede that no fair minded person could read "Dawn" and "Dusk" and conclude that Ryan's view has any scientific substance. It is instead, a religious/philosophical manifesto masquerading as science. "Dusk" demonstrates that "Dawn" is best viewed as an alternative to the Biblical creation myth. Just as the story of Adam and Eve is a text that supported the system of hegemonic patriarchy that prevailed when Genesis was penned, the myth presented in Sex at Dawn is little more than an incorrect projection of contemporary Western mores on our Paleolithic ancestors. Ryan's utopian tale might best be viewed as a post-Sexual Revolution update of the Flintstones. I loved the Flintstones and I loved Sex at Dawn, but neither tells us much about Paleolithic human behavior.