The mating game for women is all about attention.

The more attention a female gets, the greater the pool of potential partners, the more likely she comes across a male of exceptional high quality. This is the main purpose of coyness, besides evading promiscuous males of low quality. The propensity to wait until a better male shows up.

How do you get attention?

By producing signals that stand out. Such signals encompass any conceivable sensory and cognitive modality:

  • A squeaky voice is audible across much greater distances and better discernible from other noises compared to a lower voice. The spectogram of female voices has much more discernible harmonics with wider gaps. In the inner ear, different receptors are responsible for different pitches. The fewer receptors activated, the more noticeable and sharper a signal is.

  • Sweet scents are more noticeable than most other scents as they maximally stimulate few olfactory receptors and because sweet food was very valuable in our ancestral environment.

  • Bright colors stimulate particular color receptors in the eye. Pink is an extremely rare color in nature, hence something that even female toddlers choose to deck themselves with.

  • Facial contrast enhanced by makeup, stimulates groups of neurons in the visual cortex that detect contrasts and eyes.

  • This principle even transfers to more abstract things in terms of cleanliness, chastity and purity.

What unites these signals is that they have low entropy, which means that they are very highly ordered, e.g. out of infinite combinations of colors, it is only one particular one, or a combination of very few. The same applies to shapes, scents and sounds.

Flowers have evolved to solve a very similar problem: Flowers attract insects with low entropy shapes, colors and scents, such that the insects carry away their pollen. Hence, women can deck themselves with these grown shapes and scents, as it perfectly fulfills the purpose of getting attention of any living beings with brains (whether insects or males). Hence, flowers are universally something feminine.

An obvious strategy to stand out besides decking oneself, is to spoil the beautiful signals of other females. Hence women's entire psychology as been molded by evolution to manipulate the reputation of others. For this reason, it is rare that a woman achieves an honorable status.

Women's craving for attention explains why girls cheer at music festivals and men don't. A man would not gain much from drawing the attention of females. A man cannot transmit easily the qualities that make him valuable by merely cheering, so it would be futile to stand out this way. A man's primary value for a woman comes from his dominance status and his ability to extract resources. However, his physical appearance matters as much as women's, hence men are under much greater selective pressure overall. For this reason, there is also something inbred about women. The feminine has not been sharpened by natural and sexual selection as much.

But a man does not care.

She will appear beautiful anyhow, as it might as well be his only chance to spread his genes.