Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Bagehot

Victimhood is doing a lot of work here, and Bagehot knows it. He’s not sketching romance so much as policing a social economy: who is permitted to initiate, who is allowed to refuse, and who gets blamed when the script flips. The line is a neat Victorian booby trap. If a man doesn’t “make advances,” he isn’t simply shy or principled; he’s inviting danger. The implied danger isn’t physical so much as reputational and moral: being “caught,” “managed,” married into obligation, or publicly compromised by a woman bold enough to act.

Bagehot’s intent reads as a warning dressed up as worldly observation. It flatters male agency (initiate or be initiated), while casting female initiative as predatory by definition. “Apt to become victims” converts a man’s passivity into innocence and a woman’s desire into aggression. The subtext is clear: masculinity requires preemption. If you don’t choose, you’ll be chosen; if you don’t control the narrative, someone else will.

Context matters. Mid-19th-century British respectability culture treated courtship as a high-stakes transaction under surveillance, where women were expected to be gatekeepers rather than pursuers. Female forwardness threatened the class-coded choreography of consent and status. Bagehot, a liberal public intellectual with a banker’s instinct for risk, frames intimacy like exposure management: you mitigate volatility by moving first.

What makes the line endure is its cynical elegance. It’s a one-sentence argument for patriarchal initiative that masquerades as protection, turning social anxiety into “common sense” and calling it prudence.