In nature, males are the ornamental sex. So why did human culture flip this completely — and what does that tell us about the last ten thousand years?
I was watching a drama recently when the thought hit me. The female characters were lit differently, dressed more elaborately, and the camera lingered on them in a way it simply did not for the men. And I found myself thinking: why is this so universal? Why, across every medium, every culture, every era of storytelling, is it always the woman who is framed as the thing worth looking at?
Because in nature, that is not how it works. In almost every species where one sex is more visually elaborate than the other, it is the male. The peacock. The lion. The bird of paradise. The male is the one with the colours, the plumage, the display. The female is comparatively plain. And yet in humans, we seem to have flipped this entirely. There are more female models than male ones. Advertising uses women to sell almost everything, partly because humans are more easily persuaded by attractiveness, and partly because women are more consistently perceived as attractive in the first place. Go to any art gallery or scroll through any fashion magazine and the pattern holds. Women are the aesthetic gender. Men are the audience.
I found this genuinely odd. So I started pulling on the thread.
The shift, it turns out, started with the agricultural revolution. And once you understand the logic of it, the whole thing becomes hard to unsee.
When humans moved from foraging to farming, they accumulated property for the first time. Property meant inheritance. And inheritance introduced a problem that forager societies never really had to solve: men needed to be certain that the children they were passing wealth to were actually theirs. That concern, playing out at scale across thousands of years, produced an enormous cultural apparatus for controlling female sexuality and therefore female movement and appearance. Female appearance stopped being personal expression and became a signal within a market that men largely defined. A woman's looks represented her family's wealth and her own eligibility within structures that men controlled. Women who invested in appearance gained better access to resources through marriage. That made appearance investment rational. Culture then codified that rational strategy as natural femininity. And entire industries eventually industrialised it.
What happened to male ornamentation in the same period is equally telling. It did not simply stay flat. It was actively suppressed. In the late eighteenth century, European men abandoned wigs, lace, colour, and jewellery almost entirely and converged on the plain dark suit. Ornamentation became associated with frivolity. A serious man demonstrated his worth through achievement and status, not through how he looked. Men act, women appear. That became the operating logic of modern culture.
The art world reinforced it for centuries. When the dominant creators of painting, sculpture, literature, and religion are men, the aesthetic gaze gets filtered through male heterosexual preference across generations. Ancient Greek sculpture glorified the male form. The Renaissance shifted toward idealising the female form as an object of contemplation. Men were depicted doing things. Women were depicted being looked at. That distinction baked itself into culture so thoroughly that it started to feel like nature.
If male ornamentation is already culturally suppressed in the modern world, why does it seem especially suppressed in Indian men? Not just in terms of fashion or grooming, but in terms of physical development itself: the frame, the musculature, the baseline aesthetic presence.
I think the honest answer here sits almost entirely in incentives. India has a specific and compounding set of cultural forces that have historically made physical development irrelevant to male status.
Academic performance is the overwhelmingly dominant signal. A boy's worth is his marks, his college, his job title. This is not just a parenting preference. The pathways to status, income, and social respect in Indian society run almost entirely through credentialled professional achievement. Physical presence does not register in that equation at all.
The marriage market then reinforces this at a structural level. In the Indian matrimonial system, what is being evaluated in a man is caste, family background, income, and skin tone. Physique barely enters the picture. A man who is physically fit but earns modestly will consistently lose out to a man who is physically average but employed at a reputable firm. In most cultures, sexual selection rewards physical ornamentation in men because it signals health and genetic quality. In India, that selection pressure has been close to zero for a very long time, because the traits being selected for are almost entirely socioeconomic.
There is also a class dimension that compounds this further. Physical culture and sport have historically been associated with lower socioeconomic status. Manual labour is physical. Aspiration is sedentary. The desk job signals upward mobility. Investing in your body has carried a subtle but real social cost, a suggestion that you belong to the class that works with its hands rather than its mind.
And finally, there has not been a serious physical culture tradition in India until very recently. Bodybuilding culture in the West dates to the late nineteenth century. Gym culture as a mainstream middle class behaviour in India barely predates 2010. The infrastructure, the social norming, and the visible role models simply did not exist in the same way.
When you stack all of this together, you end up with a society where male physical ornamentation offered no reproductive advantage, no social status advantage, and no economic advantage. There was no reason to produce it. So across generations, it was not produced. Not because of genetics. Because the incentive was never there.
The generation of urban Indian men in their twenties today who train seriously and eat well look dramatically different from their fathers. The phenotype is shifting in real time because the incentives are finally shifting. Which tells you everything. The gap was never really about who Indian men are. It was about what their culture asked them to be.
And India is just one version of this story. The West suppressed male grooming and fashion, coding it as feminine and unserious, while leaving physical bulk relatively acceptable. East Asia went in a different direction entirely, producing strong male aesthetic cultures centred on skincare, grooming, and tailoring rather than musculature. Korean and Japanese men invest heavily in how they look, just through entirely different signals. Different cultures, different suppressions, different redirections. But the underlying mechanism is the same: whatever male ornamentation survived was the kind that the local incentive structure happened to permit.
Here is what makes all of this more interesting when you zoom out. In most sexually reproducing species, the sex that invests less in reproduction ends up competing more intensely for mates, and that competition produces ornamental traits. Males grow elaborate displays because females are choosy and males need to signal their quality. This is why the peacock has the tail and the peahen does not.
Humans are unusual because both sexes invest heavily in offspring. Gestation is long. Parenting takes years. This means both men and women have historically been choosy about partners, which means both sexes developed traits to signal quality. Human evolution did not strongly favour one sex as the ornamental one. The dimorphism exists but it is far more moderate than in species with extreme one-sided selection.
Strip away the cosmetics, the fashion, and the millennia of cultural pressure, and you find that neither sex is dramatically more elaborate than the other. Men carry ornamental traits too: facial hair with no survival function, deeper voices that evolved partly as a signal, musculature that reads as a competitive display. Women carry traits that signal reproductive health and genetic quality. Both are signalling. Both are being evaluated.
What we experience as a timeless truth — that women are naturally the decorative gender — is largely a ten thousand year old cultural artifact sitting on top of a far more balanced biological baseline. The ornamentation was always mutual. Culture just decided to amplify one side and suppress the other. And once you see that, it is very hard to unsee.
Written by Sameer
samspoke.com · Singapore