However, I suspect that when women dress up, the idea is to display a skill, at least as much as it is to display status.
I’ve seen a different evolutionary explanation, which is that females’ gene propagation is best served by cultivating uniqueness, in order to convince a man that there is no one else like her. Whereas a man’s gene propagation is best served (if he’s not the leader of the group, that is) if all men appear to be the same.
The article I read about this discussed dancing as an example of this phenomenon, noting that in nearly every known culture, traditional dances done by females are either individual or emphasize individual characteristics, whereas dances done by men are synchronous group affairs in which they all try to look the same, in order to disguise their individual differences and conceal their relative skills.
There was also a bunch of stuff about scent, martial ability, and other signals being read in male/female dances, how certain male-female dance moves common to many cultures have the function of bringing a woman’s face past a man’s underarm so she can smell his genetic compatibility or lack thereof, how men’s skill at individual dance affects both their perceived desirability as sex partners by women and how likely they are to stray… even an explanation of why men are generally far more reluctant to dance or learn how to do so than women are, unless they are confident they’ll be highly skilled at it.
Anyway, the strong implication I got was that women would likely have evolved to have a negative reaction to looking the same as another woman, because it would make them appear more interchangeable, and thus less likely to sustain the commitment of a man through pregnancy and childbirth (vs. “losing” the man to her lookalike competitor).
Whatever form this reaction manifests in—whether as just a feeling of being gauche or unskilled, or as an elaborate theory of “objectification”, there would certainly be a strong evolutionary benefit to such an adaptation, and quite likely a bigger benefit than would come from merely displaying skill to other women. Of course, it might also be that skill at presentation also signals to other women, “I am a strong competitor, so don’t try to take ‘my’ man” (whether ‘my’ means the one they have, or the one they’re going after).
I’ve seen a different evolutionary explanation, which is that females’ gene propagation is best served by cultivating uniqueness, in order to convince a man that there is no one else like her. Whereas a man’s gene propagation is best served (if he’s not the leader of the group, that is) if all men appear to be the same.
The article I read about this discussed dancing as an example of this phenomenon, noting that in nearly every known culture, traditional dances done by females are either individual or emphasize individual characteristics, whereas dances done by men are synchronous group affairs in which they all try to look the same, in order to disguise their individual differences and conceal their relative skills.
There was also a bunch of stuff about scent, martial ability, and other signals being read in male/female dances, how certain male-female dance moves common to many cultures have the function of bringing a woman’s face past a man’s underarm so she can smell his genetic compatibility or lack thereof, how men’s skill at individual dance affects both their perceived desirability as sex partners by women and how likely they are to stray… even an explanation of why men are generally far more reluctant to dance or learn how to do so than women are, unless they are confident they’ll be highly skilled at it.
Anyway, the strong implication I got was that women would likely have evolved to have a negative reaction to looking the same as another woman, because it would make them appear more interchangeable, and thus less likely to sustain the commitment of a man through pregnancy and childbirth (vs. “losing” the man to her lookalike competitor).
Whatever form this reaction manifests in—whether as just a feeling of being gauche or unskilled, or as an elaborate theory of “objectification”, there would certainly be a strong evolutionary benefit to such an adaptation, and quite likely a bigger benefit than would come from merely displaying skill to other women. Of course, it might also be that skill at presentation also signals to other women, “I am a strong competitor, so don’t try to take ‘my’ man” (whether ‘my’ means the one they have, or the one they’re going after).