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Notes -
As always these arguments confuse reasons and causes.
It may very well be that there are evolutionary forces such that women who have a certain kind of preference for appearance that is pleasing to men experience more reproductive success. That seems to me a very plausible hypothesis. But the women who have this preference do not subjectively experience it as "I enjoy looking pretty for men." They experience it as a kind of endogenous preference for a certain mode of dress or appearance. When you are discussing with women why they prefer dressing certain ways they are not giving you a description of the biological or evolutionary causes that may give rise to this preference, they are giving you their subjective reasons for that preference.
Yes, and if you stick your hand on a hot stove and instantly jerk it away, you aren't going to explain it as "an inborn reflex that is older than the concept of spoken language that evolved to quickly detect and avoid high temperatures to protect against burning off one's extremities."
You're going to say "because it hurts." That's your subjective experience of an entirely instinctual, unconscious act your brain takes without consulting your higher consciousness.
I don't particularly care what their subjective explanation is for it, if they aren't capable of changing their behavior any more than you are capable of holding your hand on a scalding stove until you smell burning flesh.
Yes, for some of them "go out in public without dolling yourself up first" is nearly as unthinkable as letting your fingers burn to a crisp.
And of course I wouldn't talk in these terms towards a woman I was actually trying to attract, b/c I also know that evolutionary pressures probably don't select for being able to make the most logically sound, rhetorically attractive arguments possible either.
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If this is a statement of your interiority, I value your anecdote because I think off-the-cuff anecdotes are often much more valuable than any amount of social “science.”
But if it’s not a description if your interior experience, on what are you basing this statement?
My experience is that women will be generally pretty willing to admit privately, to the right man, that they do enjoy looking pretty not for “men” in general (and perhaps that differentiation between “men” and “some men” is the whole sticking point), but for the sort of man they want to attract. The fact that this generally parses out to her looking pretty to a large majority of men is just one of those things that she mentally glides over.
However, it also seems to be a fairly recent turn of events that there is some mysterious source of social pressure that causes a significant number of women, as a class, to then turn around and publicly deny that they are trying to look pretty for any man at all.
I have personally been in relationships with women who were quite capable of holding both these thoughts in their head and didn’t see them as conflicting, which feels like it’s a point both for and against the vibes-based interiority you are describing. Another point against it might be that women 40, 50, 70 years ago seemed to be much more willing to say that they wanted to look good for a man or their man. Discounting for the moment the idea that women of either era are lying, it seems strange that internal understanding would regress to vibes.
To use a spear counterpart example, men who become absolute freak beasts at the gym are very willing to admit that they are doing it to compete with other men, out of a desire to move up a hierarchical ladder. Past a certain point, looking attractive to women becomes secondary to them. But they are not experiencing an endogenous preference, they are very clear about their actions being driven by a desire to exceed the men they see as their competitors.
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