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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.