Man of Steel

We live in a superhero culture. If Cupid was shooting arrows, how would he pierce the armor that our culture dresses men up in? Michael Bolton crooned a song called “I’m Not Made of Steel” in which he proclaimed appearances are sometimes deceiving and he could bend, break, and feel but ultimately he hid behind the face of his pride. Karyn White had a song on a similar theme called “Superwoman” in which she said she told the intended target of her song that she was not the kind of woman he could disappoint and think it didn't matter.
When I was a child and Valentine's Day was my favorite holiday, my favorite candy was conversation hearts, those chalky little pieces of pastel sugar with messages imprinted in red dye number two. Because this was the 70's, some of the messages were a bit hokey by modern standards, but back then "Wow" and "Be Cool" meant something along with the traditional "Be Mine" and "I Love You." Me and Beth and Lisa would sort through the whole bag during recess and give the "good ones" to the boys we liked and the ones that were vague to the boys who were smelly. Sometimes, we complained that there were not enough messages and we would formulate the conversations we needed but lacked a sugary vocabulary to indulge: Hearts that said "You Dork," perhaps, or "Get Lost."
The boys merely gobbled the candy and ran around like they had ADHD during recess only we didn't know what ADHD was back then, and paid no attention to us in general unless we were wearing a dress on the monkey bars or had a really cool scab to show them or they needed to borrow a pencil from us. Part of this is because we were playing with Barbie dolls, and Barbie had a wedding dress. Ken had a tuxedo. We had Easy-bake ovens in which we baked our daddies little round cakes with the heat from a light bulb which was practice for making big round cakes someday for our husbands. We had other dolls who were babies that cried maw-maw and toddlers who could really walk and be our play pals.
And the boys all had GI Joe who came with a paratrooper set or a tiger and a cage. Joe was not worried about women or fatherhood or much of anything else. The boys of my childhood had Hot Wheels and marbles and six-shooter cap guns and Daisy air rifles. So while the argument can be made that the way boys and girls notice each other and interact is cultural, it seems obvious that is only part of the answer. Little boys have dormant sperm factories. They do not become operational until puberty when the testosterone starts downloading. Girls, however, have all the eggs they will ever have before they are even born. It is at puberty when the eggs begin to be released in anticipation of fertilization, once the facility to nurture a baby becomes possible. When a female runs out of eggs, menopause occurs, whereas men remain capable of fathering children until their death bed in many cases. Nature is logical that way - imagine if both genders remained capable of producing children to the point of old age and Alzheimer's. We'd have children abandoned not for cultural or emotional reasons (which already strains our society) but biological abandonment through death.
This is part of the reason women cover their gray hair and invest in Botox and plastic surgery and cosmetics. Some women in our culture view any attempt to improve appearance as the effort to please the male gender and they categorically view all such activities as therefore wrong. The simple truth is that cosmetics and all other enhancements, from temporary injections to permanent surgical procedures and everything in between, procedures and products, all of these are designed to do one thing:

make the female look like she has ripe eggs.

Daytime talk shows have a staple topic in tiny tot beauty queens who have nothing to put in the cup of a bra except tissue, but their immature faces look like cover girls who are sexually available. That's what cosmetics do. Eyeliner and mascara makes the pupil look bigger. Blush makes the cheeks bright and lipstick makes the lips look engorged and filled with blood. This is all designed to mirror what biologically happens to the female face during sexual arousal. So in some females, this process is used to age one, but it is also used to reverse the signs of aging as well. When a woman goes through menopause, she can still avail herself of these cosmetics and procedures in order to appear that she still has ripe eggs. Of course, if you don't have eggs then someone who does have sperm is not really interested. (Go figure what is up with pedophiles. Somebody needs to.) For women, looking younger can be about pleasing men and attracting those who have sperm, which is all of them past 13 years of age. But it can also be a means of empowering yourself, of looking like there are still ripe eggs in the ovaries. If men ran out of sperm at a certain age, you can be sure there would be a plethora of research to reverse the process, or at least a multitude of products to hide the evidence. They have a multitude now just to hide the evidence that they are slowing down. If all women were whisked off the planet tomorrow, some men would still want to cover their gray and go to the gym. They want to look good in front of other men. They want to look good to themselves. Women can want these same things regardless of men they do or do not want to impress.