My name is Lynn Saxon...

and I wrote Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn. That might seem an unnecessary statement considering that this is an author blog but there have been rumours that it is not my real name and that I don’t exist. It is and I do.
    The best way to grasp my reasons for writing “Sex at Dusk” it is to read it, as many people have now done. Some of those readers already had their own doubts about “Sex at Dawn” so for them it was just a case of having its many shortcomings clearly stated. But other readers had been so convinced by “Dawn” that they had been actively spreading the word and even gifting copies of the book to others. Some feel cheated, lied to, and angry. I’ll give an extended example to help understand why.
    Imagine you are writing a book about human sexuality and reading about a different culture, say the Mehinaku [1]. As the title – Anxious Pleasures – suggests, the author states that much of the book describes the antagonistic character of men’s and women’s relationships.
    The author of Anxious Pleasures estimates that there were 88 extramarital affairs going on amongst the 37 adults though actual sexual encounters are modest in frequency, limited by long taboos associated with rituals and the life cycle, by the absence of privacy, by competition from jealous husbands and more attractive rivals, and especially by the difficulty of finding a willing female partner. Several of the young men say they are able to have sex on a once-a-day basis but the author writes that “the frequency of sex for the average Mehinaku, however, is far less”.
    He briefly mentions that he believes the affairs contribute to village cohesion and promote enduring relationships based on mutual affection. Three of the 17 women account for nearly 40% of the total number of liaisons (three others have no lover and excite no sexual interest, while even the most unattractive men can obtain a sexual encounter through offering a gift). One of the three most sexually active women had joined the village with her children after abandoning her husband, and she and her children were initially treated poorly. Through sex with many men she was able to obtain fish and protection for her family, and the author writes that her case “suggests that the pressures and incentives for a woman to engage in extramarital affairs sometimes leave her very vulnerable to the men’s advances”.
    The rest of the book documents the ambivalence of men’s and women’s relationships. You read that the sexuality of females is linked to their inferiority and the disgust with their bodies and menstrual blood. Sex is brief and rarely with any foreplay, and orgasm for women is unlikely. The Mehinaku men use the term ‘stingy with their genitals’ about the women as many of the men are constantly sexually frustrated and often have to exchange gifts for sex. Husbands and wives are sexually jealous and affairs are fraught with danger, and life is full of sexual gossip and intrigue. Promiscuity for a woman is seen as potentially dangerous and may lead to the birth of twins or some other abnormality, in which case the infant or infants are buried alive.
     The author also writes that the Mehinaku are one of a number of tribes in this region where the men have sacred flutes and the women are gang-raped, or threatened with gang rape, should they set eyes on these flutes. Their mythology is one of an original matriarchy, the men having seized power from the women. Since then women have been kept in their inferior place with gang rape as one threatened punishment for not accepting male rule. He writes that the women are fearful of the men and their potential violence, and even have nightmares about it. There is also a thin line between consensual and forced sex as the man often takes the woman by the wrist and she is “dragged off” for sex, the term for this ‘dragging off’ being the same term as that for rape by an individual man (there is a different term for gang rape). The author says: “the system is maintained by the threat of phallic aggression”.
    There is general intimidation of women and the author writes that “in the battle of the sexes, women are the losers”. He writes about the constant sexual frustration of men that permeates their relationships and institutions, and about many of the similarities between Mehinaku and American culture though “the Mehinaku pattern of masculinity is more exaggerated than our own”.
    So, what do you decide to take from this? Under what circumstances would you do as Ryan and Jethá have done and choose to quote only the estimation of 88 extramarital affairs going on amongst the 37 adults and the association of this with village cohesion? Under what circumstances would you go on to use this strategy of screening out any sign of sexual conflict repeatedly throughout your own book? It is clearly neither accidental nor unintentional. One reason might be to enable you to make many jokes such as a jokey and false assertion that these women “vocalize” during sex as a way to invite other men to join in (none of the Amazonian women quoted in “Dawn” do this – and nor do women in the other cultures mentioned).
    This is a lack of respect for the sources used. It is a lack of respect for readers. And it is a lack of respect for these peoples whose lives are reduced to saucy titbits for the amusement – and self-interested sexual agendas – of modern, privileged Westerners.
    And it certainly isn’t science.
    Does it matter? Yes it does, because letting this kind of book with its misleading and sanitised stories (and its clear errors) pass unchallenged enables them to spread and to become established as ‘facts’ that people come to know. They spread not only by word of mouth as readers tell friends and family but also, more disturbingly, they get into more books and are even cited in academic papers [2],[3]. (“Dawn” is even picked out as recommended reading in one of these [2].)
    David Ley calls “Sex at Dawn” a “delightful book” in his 2012 book The Myth of Sex Addiction [4]. Citing “Dawn” he writes about Melanesian Islanders where women viewed their husbands’ concubines with pride as they were reflective of his high status, and he writes how “European and colonial laws against infidelity soon stopped this practice, to the lament of many of the men of the island”.
     In “Dusk” I have filled in some important gaps in this story which I have already repeated in my previous blog Sex and Science. Ryan and Jethá, and now Ley, are right that these men miss their concubines. As Davenport actually says [5]: “In brief, men with social positions of consequence and past their physical prime did, and still do, desire to have women over whom they could exercise absolute authority; on whom they could heap material favors – young women who could remain uncalloused by hard work, and whom they could possess sexually, yet cast off when passion declined or when an opportunity for profit appeared”.
    What’s more, it was not European laws against infidelity that stopped this practice. Davenport writes that these islanders had their own severe sanctions against sex outside marriage (other than with these owned concubines) and that: “Social efforts to forestall, to discover, and to punish proven sex offenders [“fornicators” and “adulterers”] are far more vigorous than any that occur even among the most Puritanical segments of our own society... Only murder carries a more severe punishment.” It was, in fact, colonial laws against prostitution that stopped the practice. The elder owners of concubines were allowing young men to have sex with the women in exchange for the European trade goods these young men had accumulated while working away on plantations. As Davenport says, when this law came in the men, being astute traders, sold their concubines to poorer men in other districts and thus suffered little financial loss.
    In our efforts to be ‘sex positive’ we are in constant danger of falling for whitewashed stories about human sexuality that deny the full and complex – and often negative – reality of sex. As Professor Tim Birkhead writes in the preface of his excellent book on sperm competition Promiscuity [6]: “the very fact that sex is so important to us means that we are vulnerable to being exploited by it. This, in turn, means that it is important that we understand it – and particularly from an evolutionary perspective.”
    I believe that being ‘sex positive’ is about people having access to full and honest information about sex, and so I wrote Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn.




1     Gregor, T. (1985). Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2    Conley, T. D., et al. (2011). Women, Men, and the Bedroom: Methodological and Conceptual Insights That Narrow, Reframe, and Eliminate Gender Differences in Sexuality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(5): 296-300.

3     Conley, T. D., et al. (2013). A Critical Examination of Popular Assumptions About the Benefits and Outcomes of Monogamous Relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(2): 124-141.

4    Ley, David J. (2012). The Myth of Sex Addiction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

5     Davenport, W. H. (1965). Sexual patterns and their regulation in a society of the southwest Pacific. In F. A. Beach (Ed.), Sex and behaviour. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

6    Birkhead, T. R. (2000). Promiscuity: an evolutionary history of sperm competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.