Norm that men should take the initiative in courtship

The norm that men should take the initiative in courtship assigns men the role of pursuer and women the role of pursued. It is more than a convention of approach: it shapes whose desire can appear autonomous, whose consent is framed as a response, and which partner is understood to have won. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, the rule belongs to a wider order that makes woman an autonomous freedom whom men nevertheless force to assume herself as the Other, limiting her capacity to act as an equal subject.

Definition and Social Logic

The convention rests on a gendered division of agency. A man is expected to make his desire active and personal; a woman is expected to offer herself rather than select a partner openly. Most men, Simone de Beauvoir observes, are jealous of their assigned role: they want to awaken a particular response in a woman, not to be chosen simply to meet a general desire. A woman who takes the initiative can therefore be treated as though she has made the man feel used, rather than as someone exercising an equivalent freedom.

This asymmetry gives courtship its language of conquest. The man is expected to pursue and win; the woman’s desire is represented as something that makes her prey to the man rather than an intention she can claim in her own right. Even when a woman’s advances succeed, the conventional account credits the man with conquering her. The norm thus preserves male initiative not only in conduct but in the interpretation of what has happened.

Consequences for Women’s Agency

The expectation puts women in a double bind. If a woman expresses desire too directly, a man may withdraw because he insists on being the conqueror. To make her initiative acceptable within the convention, she may have to appear passive and to let herself be treated as a prize. She may then imagine that she has willingly produced this response and recovered her standing as a subject, but the arrangement leaves open the risk that the man will regard her as a fixed, useless object. Rejection can consequently humiliate her more deeply than it humiliates a man whose pursuit has failed: she has been required to expose her desire while surrendering the appearance of acting on it.

The convention also makes an accepted advance ambiguous. A woman may understand herself as having chosen, but public opinion continues to cast the man as the victor and the woman as the one he possesses. Simone de Beauvoir connects this account to the larger opposition between transcendence and immanence: a subject seeks to act through projects and reach beyond the given, while a woman’s initiative is pushed back into a role defined by men. Her analysis treats the resulting restriction as social, not as evidence that women lack desire or freedom.

Courtship and Sexual Relations

The norm extends from courtship into the couple’s intimate relations, where the man may treat the encounter as a contest in which he must take rather than receive. He can seek to make the woman’s consent look like defeat and her expressions of pleasure like admissions of submission. In that pattern, mutual exchange gives way to a performance in which male activity confirms superiority and female response is made to signify surrender.

Simone de Beauvoir’s examples show how the expected roles can distort even a woman’s attempt to choose freely. Claudine intends to offer herself promptly to Renaud, but he anticipates her by forcing the encounter into a display of his own triumph. The point is not that her desire is absent; it is that the convention gives the man power to determine what her desire will mean. A woman who resists passivity may also find that pride and the expected forms of erotic response work against one another, further narrowing the space in which she can act without being recast as submissive or rejected as too assertive.

Structural Significance

This rule is part of the broader situation in which women know and choose themselves in a world where men define them in relation to male needs. Economic and social inequality reinforce the convention: male privilege and the prestige attached to marriage encourage women to seek men’s approval, while the expectation of male initiative presents that unequal arrangement as ordinary courtship. The rule therefore links a familiar personal script to the larger structure of women’s dependence.

For Simone de Beauvoir, women’s freedom cannot be measured by whether a particular pursuit ends in acceptance or by whether a woman can make herself appear to choose. The decisive issue is whether both partners can act as subjects without one being assigned the role of conqueror and the other of prey. The norm persists precisely because it makes an unequal distribution of initiative look like the natural form of desire; exposing that logic reveals courtship as one of the places where women’s broader subordination is reproduced.