Is it in their nature or hardwired into them by our culture?

Most of the alt-culture, feminist, artsy men I’ve been involved with, the ones who buck and question social conventions and develop their own personal value systems rather than swallowing whole what they’ve been force-fed by culture — those men will not “chase” women. They will let a relationship develop organically. They will give a woman the space to pull an equal amount of weight in that development. They won’t treat a woman like an object to be acquired through careful, artful, strategic pursuit. And they are the strongest, most honest and dependable men I’ve known.

Men who believe that it’s their role to be the pursuer irritate the hell out of me, personally. The one guy I ever allowed to chase me successfully ended up doing everything he could to control and cage me while we were together. He isolated me from my friends and claimed that I would have been lost if he hadn’t come along.

Man as pursuer and woman as pursued is not biological hardwiring. It’s cultural hardwiring. And it’s a concept that forces women to remain disempowered in romantic and sexual relationships with men.