Personally, I feel that I want to be pretty as a goal in itself and in order to be attractive to straight men (and to other gynosexual people). I suspect women[1] have an evolved intrinsic desire to look pretty because in the ancestral environment it increased your genetic fitness to look pretty. To give an analogy, we eat both because (i) we are hungry and also food tastes good, and because (ii) we know we need to eat to survive (e.g. if you’re sick and have no appetite you sometimes force yourself to eat) and we need particular types of food to stay healthy. A single activity can be motivated by a mixture of terminal and instrumental goals.
Personally, I feel that I want to be pretty as a goal in itself and in order to be attractive to straight men (and to other gynosexual people). I suspect women[1] have an evolved intrinsic desire to look pretty because in the ancestral environment it increased your genetic fitness to look pretty. To give an analogy, we eat both because (i) we are hungry and also food tastes good, and because (ii) we know we need to eat to survive (e.g. if you’re sick and have no appetite you sometimes force yourself to eat) and we need particular types of food to stay healthy. A single activity can be motivated by a mixture of terminal and instrumental goals.
And other genders too, but for women it’s more pronounced, on average.
I am just not buying this argument that men do not have an equivalently strong drive to be handsome