Consent: Violence and the Vibrating Scabbard

Abstract

‘No sane man can believe, that a woman of average height and strength, and not overcome by drugs, could be violated by one man’.¹ These were the words of gynaecologist Lawson Tait in an 1894 article on sexual offences against females. Tait used knowledge of the ‘average’ woman’s body to justify the expectation that she could, and should, fight off an attempted offence. His work suggests that he was more cynical than most of his peers, as he published widely about the prevalence of false claims in rape trials, but was not alone in believing in a normal woman’s capacity to resist. The Medical Press had published similar comments in July 1890: ‘[g]enerally speaking, few medical men of experience believe much in rape in the case of a moderately healthy and vigorous woman’.² Such claims were grounded in the belief that a man could not achieve penetration of a woman who resisted to her utmost, as articulated through the rape myth that it was ‘impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard’.³ As late as 1913 the US Police Surgeon Gurney Williams pointed out in International Clinics, published in London and Philadelphia, that mere ‘crossing of the knees’ would prevent rape.⁴