Sexual dimorphism has always persisted across time and space for humanity. Nothing was ever arbitrary. Women tend to do things based on biological wiring and cultural dimensions, which I admit can vary greatly, and men make sure not to reflect that to signal away from weaknesses that compromise the symbolic image of being a reliable man for reproductive reasons as those guys get picked less. It's "relative" and quite explanatory, not arbitrary.
I can off the top of my head easily explain why long nails were a reflection of feminity. Because you cannot be a warrior, holding weapons while maintaining pretty long nails. It reflects a feminine beauty care and calm life. A man had to since he was sent here be durable and chip nails constantly to survive; bodily stress is common. So when Drake says, "boy, don't make me have to chip a nail," the guy was basically saying, I have been living lavishly like a feminine woman without the societal stressors the average man has to struggle with to prove and live his manhood but I will chip these nail-polished fingers I have been cultivating like a shordy if you keep playing.
The high-heeled shoes were initially a practical masculine addition to horseriding in Persia. It was appropriated and modified away from its first context by out-of-touch, decadent elite men who were reaching too far to look drippy in Western Europe and quickly stopped wearing them when women said, "Pretty, I want them too."
All in all, we have our tendencies hard-wired. Pick any culture 30,000 years ago that has archeological comprehensive study and you will see marked sexual differences in wear and behavior, no matter where. When men do something similar to women, it usually has a very different meaning than women when they do the same act. It is a significant addition. Because it underscores how different we are.
One study, for example, showed that women wear high heels because it makes them look more attractive when their lumbar curvature is maximized- i.e., their ass is arching. All to accentuate their bodies toward feminine ideals. That has absolutely no association with the initial reasons why men wore it in Persia; to ride the beasts better for war. It was designed for better footing.
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So, it is very much not arbitrary, even in culture-specific and macro. There are strong rationales for these behaviors that have nothing to do with one another when they align.
We've often heard the random person say the Scots wear kilts, as an example of boundaries broken to emphasize that expressions by men and women in a certain culture have no masculine or feminine traits. Well, one has to go into why kilt is a thing among men in Scotland. It was not because they wanted to look pretty whatsoever. Similar to Persian men with heels, Scotsmen wore kilt in war conditions.
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I know it looks hilarious from our point of view LMAO. But it was never used by men to signal what women do when they wear a skirt. The kilt initially was actually more than a skirt:
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It used to protect them and at night, covering themselves with it to keep their whole body warm as a blanket. It had a very practical original. Later it was banned, but now it is an identity thing, a cultural practice.
There is a very strong difference between saying, men and women wear the same to make a claim of arbitrariness when that is never the case; there is always a strong dimorphic rationale. Scottish women don't wear kilts because of masculine associations and their initial history among Highland Scottish men. Some might break tradition and do today but that was never the case during the initial early modern period.
Now, I have to say, that just because a culture has certain practices that are even strictly masculine in its roots, it is not necessarily right. Same reason why being half naked is not correct. It's important to separate analysis and explanation for promotion and justification. I would imagine it would be wrong to wear a kilt that does not sufficiently cover the knees. And it would be necessary for women in Minoan culture during the Bronze Age to cover their bare-chested bodies despite their culture calling it a symbol of fertility, instead taking care to cover their ankles completely because it was ceeb to show it.
Ignorance is rife among humans often. You have these men in India who never cut their nails ever until their hands became deformed as a way to practice their so-called spiritual paths. Or in the premodern Chinese very common custom of foot binding where the feet of girls had to be folded.
These are extremes showing how humans can go too far in these attempts to signal certain sexual-related traits through lifestyle pronounced commitments. So I don't believe in this cultural relativistic assessment as a way to justify human mistakes. It's just a tool for understanding and parsing out one thing from another, effectively. People often conflate things for quite ideological reasons, as a means to call that out when they attempt to blur lines to imply that human behavior in the cultural sense has whimsical non-alignments from a broad perspective by pointing to practices that have separate roots anthropologically that have deep associations with sexual dimorphism, one can easily explain them. Even strong deviations can clearly be traced to root ignorance and faulty mythology and strange traditional excuses.
I commend you for writing a book on a topic u know nothing about.
A for the effort
"One study, for example, showed that women wear high heels because it makes them look more attractive when their lumbar curvature is maximized- i.e.,"
Maybe the study should ask "real brain of women" to know why women like high heels.
Proto-type female- like everything that glitters. They are the equivalent of the animal kingdom where the male are the glittering shinny- pretty glamorous ones who use their nature to attract mating females.
For humans it is the opposite, women are the beautiful ones. Or must glitter. Women don't do it to attract men, they do it out of sheer sense of creativity that flows innately. Like a woman who has thousands of ways of cooking a meal or concocting a meal. Over flowing creativity!
Funnily-- these "real brain of women" is now common in gay males. Gay males who thrive in working as Chef or Fashion design.
The high heels appeal for women was invented by gay men small French men in 1600s Women naturally adopted it to suit them- because they seem a little taller and sexier with high heels.
The photo in my profile is the 5th Duchess of Devonshire of England - she is accounted for inventing the High Hair and high Feather in aristocratic fashion in 1780s. Ever since then aristocratic women started wearing feathers up to today.
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