The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
men of smaller growth. They are not so; they have the laws
of their own nature; their development must be along their
own lines, and not along masculine lines. 18
Ellis’s prescription of such sexual differences between men and
women undermined the feminist arguments that the form taken
by male sexuality was the result not of biology but of social
influences; Another way in which he undermined the work of
the feminists who were campaigning against male sexual abuse
of women and children, was to promote ideas diametrically
opposed to theirs on the subject of sexual offences. Having
pronounced that women enjoyed pain and being forced to
surrender it is not surprising that Ellis had difficulty believing
that rape or sexual assault to which women did not consent and
which they did not want, could exist at all. He thought that
such offences must be extremely rare and that false accusations
and lies made up the vast majority of reported cases. He quoted
with obvious approval an experiment carried out by one Lawson
Tait who examined 70 charges of sexual assault upon girls
under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Tait was
able to advise prosecution in only 6 cases and in these cases
convictions were obtained, whereas in 7 other cases where the
police decided to prosecute there was either no conviction or a
very light sentence. In 26 cases, according to Tait, the charge
was clearly trumped up. The average age of the girls was 12
and what seems to have worried Tait most about them was that
they used ‘sexual argot’ (slang) in describing what had happened
to them. The fact that they were able to give ‘minute and
detailed descriptions’ helped Tait to reach the conclusion that
the children had not in fact been assaulted. He was horrified
that they were not sheltered and innocent according to the
stereotype of the young middle-class girl of the day. Ellis extended
Tait’s conclusion about the rarity of genuine cases of assault to
cover the rape of adult women. He explained that women
probably raped men just as often as the reverse. He doesn’t
explain how. He considered that the cry of rape was used to
cover up women’s voluntary sexual exploits:
There can be little doubt that the plea of force is very
frequently seized upon by women as the easiest available
weapon of defence when her connection had been revealed.
She has been so permeated by the current notion that no
‘respectable’ woman can possibly have any sexual impulses
of her own to gratify that, in order to screen what she feels to
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