Debunking Lynn Saxon’s Sex at Dusk
A rebuttal to Sex at Dawn was written, called Sex at Dusk by Lynn Saxon. She points out examples of cherry-picking, some of which convinced me. However, she also engages in some serious cherry-picking herself. This was noticed by several Amazon reviews, as were her straw man arguments and obvious vendetta against the book. She pretty much accuses the authors of Dawn of advocating for gang rape. My jaw dropped at some of the absurd straw man arguments and accusations.
For example, she claimed that the authors of Dawn said our ancestors lived in bands of 150 people, didn’t mate outside of that, and mated with everyone inside, finding everyone equally attractive. Nope. They never said that.
She is savagely determined to prove that humans have always been male-dominated and either monogamous or polygynous. And also that all women are whores, not sluts, with no real sex drive outside of procreation or some sort of exchange. I will refrain from speculating about her potential psychological motivation for this, as she does with the authors of Dawn. I know for a fact she is wrong about this last point. Because I’m female with no desire to procreate, and have had at some points of my life an overwhelming sex drive. Many female friends say the same.
Saxon, the author of Sex at Dusk, confidently declares so many things to be true that the evidence has proven false. “That the Mosuo stand so alone in their replacement of husbands by brothers”.[i] I guess she avoids the abundant evidence we’ve seen for the “avunculate,” the uncle system in matrilineal groups that is so common it was given a name by anthropologists.
“It is clear that hunter-gatherers, like all other human societies, all have marriage.”[ii] Not really, no. Of course there’s the Mosuo, who she claims “must have lost it.” Talk about circular reasoning. You can call what Trobriand islanders do marriage, but it’s basically just moving your stuff into someone’s hut for a while. Same for Native Americans. It wasn’t formalized or seen as permanent. In pre-contact Hawaii, only chiefs had a marriage that was different from co-habitation, and as we’ve seen, elites often have separate patriarchal customs, relics of a colonization.
One article cited by Saxon surveyed the wide variety of courtship among modern cultures. It concludes, “The ancestral state of early human marriage is not well known given the lack of conclusive archaeological evidence.”[iii] I guess Saxon didn’t read that part. Talk about cherry-picking.
This was an article she cited as evidence that cross-cousin marriage “arises naturally.”[iv] But what the article says is that it arises naturally under certain conditions. Which I would describe as extreme patrism. It’s seen among extreme patrist groups in Papua New Guinea and the Amazon (there is some evidence to suggest a cross-Pacific journey sometime in antiquity that may have brought these traits to the Amazon.) It’s seen among extreme patrist groups in the Middle East, even still today. And there is evidence to suggest it existed among early Indo-Europeans.
She seems to think that hunter-gatherers who had some form of co-habitation despite their remote locations are proof of the universality of marriage. However, hunter-gatherers got around a lot more than we imagine. Over 5000 years of patriarchy, they would have all had contact with patriarchal groups. As we’ve seen, it spreads very easily to a new group. Saxon mentions that one Mosuo woman said she was embarrassed to not know who her child’s father was, as a way of arguing for the universality of paternity insistance. I can only imagine this woman was from very recent times and perhaps went to university, like the Naxi student who became ashamed of her ancestral customs. The Naxi too are male dominated now, though the oldest speak of female leaders in their lifetimes.
She claims all hunter-gatherers were all about paternity and the sexual fidelity of women.[v] Nope. The accounts of Lewis and Clarke’s expedition include sex with married women in the area now known as Washington. And others have experienced that with the Inuit. These accounts seem mostly to have been from male-dominated societies where the sex was a form of exchange with the husbands, not examples of empowered women. However, it’s still proof that not all husbands are jealous and obsessed with paternity.
However, I personally lean toward the belief that jealousy goes deep in us, based on how it feels and how my cat behaves. But in cultures that don’t prioritize it, it doesn’t predominate.
Saxon says it’s “near-impossible to believe that ancestral males would not use food in exchange for sex.”[vi] I guess that’s a failure of imagination and ignorance of the way women control food in matrilineal cultures.
Saxon herself points out that the Mosuo have fewer children, due to women having full control over their fertility.[vii] Hmm. In a world with plenty of people, shouldn’t this be an argument for a return to matrilineal kinship? And she herself points out that human females’ continual sexual receptivity would reduce sperm competition, since mating is spread out.[viii] This would help explain why we see less sperm competition than in the bonobo. And, on this note, she quotes anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Hrdy as saying sperm competition is “an unfortunate consequence of polyandrous matings.”[ix] Doesn’t that prove that polyandry was a significant force in our ancestral environment? And finally, she does admit that “no one is arguing that humans had an exclusively sexually monogamous past.”[x]
She loves to cherry pick data about the worst aspects of humans, like how the Siriono abandon those too old or sick to travel with the group. This is true of many (patriarchal) cultures, but one archaeologist documented at least thirty cases where severely ill or disabled people only could have survived with help, all in the pre-patriarchal past.[xi]
[i] Saxon, Lynn. Sex at Dusk. 2012, 173.
[ii] Ibid., 234.
[iii] Walker, Robert S. et al. “Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices.” PloS One, April 27, 2011.
[iv] Ibid, 144.
[v] Ibid., 142.
[vi] Ibid., 219.
[vii] Ibid., 174.
[viii] Ibid., 103.
[ix] Ibid., 249.
[x] Ibid., 259.
[xi] Gorman, James. “Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion.” New York Times, Dec 17, 2012.