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Being attractive to men, is, like it or not, a pretty big part of the typical woman's self esteem, even if she's not looking right then. Obviously they can't just come out and say that, because feminism, so it's unstated, but it can obviously be both.
That's what I'm saying.
Eons of generations have gone into each facet of the female psyche. Their biological imperative is, to a large degree, to appeal to men's sexual desires. Even if its not literally about sex, that's where most of this is coming from.
Their own psychology is innately, inextricably entangled with making themselves appealing to the male brain. "Men like me if I'm pretty, therefore being pretty is good, therefore I feel good when I'm pretty."
So trying to rewrite it to seem like "I just like making my mouth look soft and kissable and pumping up my cleavage for prominent display and wearing painted on leggings that emphasize my rump because I feel good when I dress up this way completely independent of how any man might perceive it" is a tad farcical.
No woman puts in that much effort to make herself feel good and then chooses to just lounge around the house rather than going out in hopes of snagging some actual attention. And rightly so.
(and no, I ain't acting like men's fashion doesn't follow similar principles)
Gonna disagree, why wouldn't evolution just make it feel good to be attractive, without providing us with its chain of reasoning?
Because if it felt good to be sexy even in the absence of an audience, women would dress exactly the same way while lounging around at home as they do when out in public. No woman spends an hour applying makeup just so she can rot in bed watching Netflix, ergo the audience (whether male, female or both) must be a necessary ingredient in the cocktail.
That's not the crux though, one would expect evolution to give people a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive in public, rather than in private.
It sounds like you're just rephrasing @faceh's point in different words. I don't see how "evolution gave us a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive when they have an audience, but not when they don't have an audience" is a meaningfully different assertion from "any woman who claims she dresses up 'for herself' is full of shit". Surely if dressing up feels good if and only if you have an audience, that logically implies that no one is really dressing up "for themselves".
Okay so compare: 'Evolution gave us a brain that enjoys different flavours because it gives us the nutrients to survive." With: 'Anyone who claims they eat food 'just for the taste' is full of shit. They are really doing it to get a proper range of nutrients.'
Or: 'Evolution gave us a brain that feels good during orgasm because it leads to reproduction." With: 'Anyone who claims they seek orgasm just for its own sake is full of shit.'
We find ourselves with the brains and reward systems we have. The good thing about human autonomy is that (in theory) we can often co-opt these systems for other motivations. Is it a neat capability we are in full control of? Absolutely not. But we can still distinguish why we do x from the historical reasons and general reasons for our proclivity to x.
The difference being that, in your examples, the claimed reason for doing X really exists, and continues to exist even in the absence of the evolutionary "goal" to which it is directed. It's true that tasty food tastes good; it's true that orgasms feel good. Lots of tasty food is lacking in nutritional value, and lots of things can result in orgasm even though there is no chance of procreation resulting. People can and do consume tasty food just because it tastes good, paying no mind to the nutritional content thereof; people can and do pursue orgasms just because they feel good, paying no mind to whether or not reproduction ensues as a result.
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not. But if dressing up only feels good if you have an audience, then the claimed reason for doing X is simply untrue. Unlike the obesity crisis and porn addiction, there is no widespread societal epidemic of people spending thousands on clothes and makeup just so they can sit at home "feeling good" in their fancy clothes and makeup (obviously being an aspiring camgirl or influencer doesn't count: a virtual audience is still an audience). The audience is a necessary component to the activity in question feeling good: ergo, the claims to be dressing up "for myself" are an obvious post hoc rationalisation to rebut accusations of narcissism or attention-seeking, in a memetic environment in which women explicitly admitting to putting stock in or deriving positive feelings from male attention is seen as déclassé.
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
It's interesting because eating food "just for the taste" is in a way affirming the evolutionary reason. Our taste buds evolved for a reason. Just because we've figured out how to make some tasty foods that lack nutrition doesn't mean we like to eat doritos despite our evolution. Our bodies literally think we are getting nutrition when we seek that out.
Likewise, a woman painting her face and dressing scantily may tell herself it's for her own confidence or whatever. But it doesn't refute that she's doing it for male attention and reproductive success. I think the audience discussion is a bit of a red herring, although there are some interesting points to be made there.
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I think this is overstated. 'Dressing for yourself' can surely include feeling good when dressed up in public. You are participating in status games, you are expressing yourself, and you are turning heads because you enjoy the feeling of power that it gives you or because you are free of the anxiety of being judged or shamed when you know you're looking your best and your flaws have been minimised. That's markedly different than enjoying turning heads specifically because you want to make men horny. This is the difference between someone who dresses skimpily and whose primary satisfaction from that is attention from men, and someone who is interested in fashion and experiments with things that are orthogonal to basic male attraction (and the latter is a large amount of what people talk about on, say, your average style podcast – they are not always discussing how to be sexier in veiled terms, though they sometimes are, a lot of the time they are discussing trends, novelty and details of a kind that I daresay most men are pretty oblivious to and that are more to do with status, social impression, coolness and craft than sexiness).
I think the analogy for this would be a woman dressing with effort even though she doesn't want sexual attention and might actually be annoyed by it. That's pretty easy to imagine isn't it?
I also think you need to tease out many gradations of possible meaning in the spectrum of dressing for yourself vs dressing for others. I would think the primary meaning is that your objective is to feel good in such contexts that others think you look good or have matched the occasion (a form of female success). This inner feeling is going to be distinct from dressing up instrumentally just because you want e.g. male attention. Now sure there is an extreme interpretation of doing something for yourself that means you would get the pleasant feeling even if no one else can notice. But I don't think that is particularly central natural language usage. If you do carpentry for yourself as a hobby, you might be disillusioned if you were never allowed to give your wooden creations to anyone or show them to anyone. Part of their value lies in the pride you're able to take in showing them. But a lot of it is also in the feeling of mastery you have when working with wood and being able to create the 'kind of thing' that others would value. I think it would still be fair in such a scenario to say you were pursuing carpentry for yourself.
I also think it would be okay for a man to say they were pursuing orgasm for its own sake even though they actually could just get that via porn. (There are different flavours of orgasm only achievable with others.)
As an aside, I think women actually do often dress up by themselves. This is experimentation and practice I guess, but I think they enjoy it loads, from girlhood on.
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The term 'attractive' itself implies there's at least two entities involved, being compelled to move towards each other by some force or other.
i.e, you can't be 'attractive' unless there's something towards which the attraction is directed, no? So it feels good to be 'attractive,' but you can't judge what is or is not attractive in the vacuum of your own singular mind.
Evolution doesn't provide us the chain of reasoning, we have to infer what logics of fitness and survival brought us here, but the co-evolution of the sexes means almost any behavioral feature of one sex is inherently determined by millennia of interactions with the other, with several feedback loops involved as well.
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