(I’m not arguing those were “the good old days” by any stretch of the imagination, mind. I’ll take society as it exists today. But certainly we had this kind of signaling capability before and it was dismantled.)
I think we’re blowing things out of proportion here. Clothing, and appearance more generally, has widely-recognized signaling value in sexual matters, even today. It’s just that the signals involved are quite a bit fuzzier than ‘dressing provocatively means that wolf-whistling is welcome’. And it’s not even clear that this is a bad thing.
Apart from wedding/engagement rings, can you name a single piece of clothing [eta: or ensemble, vaguely-defined or otherwise] with a widely-recognized heterosexual sexual signal? By widely recognized, I expect that at least half of all men, and at least half of all women, would know what it means?
I think we’re blowing things out of proportion here. Clothing, and appearance more generally, has widely-recognized signaling value in sexual matters, even today. It’s just that the signals involved are quite a bit fuzzier than ‘dressing provocatively means that wolf-whistling is welcome’. And it’s not even clear that this is a bad thing.
Apart from wedding/engagement rings, can you name a single piece of clothing [eta: or ensemble, vaguely-defined or otherwise] with a widely-recognized heterosexual sexual signal? By widely recognized, I expect that at least half of all men, and at least half of all women, would know what it means?