The general opinion in society still seems to be that women have almost all the pressure to look good. They have to do their makeup, pick the right clothes, do their hair right, wear padded bras and underwear etc. just to be seen out in public and get taken seriously.

Men supposedly just need "confidence". I was told so many times, things like "women are attracted to confidence", "women are not really bothered about looks", "just be confident and you'll attract women", "women care about personality, character and confidence, men care about looks". If you believed all this, you would think men don't have any pressure to look good.

But now we're in this age of Tinder, online dating and social media, it seems very clear that male looks are extremely important. Men are held to far higher standards of physical beauty. Women are now extremely picky with who they have sex with and it's done almost exclusively on looks (they barely need to rely on men for resources anymore).

Men can find a variety of different women hot - different sizes, shapes, heights, races. Almost every woman will be found attractive by men. Even very fat 3/10 women can regularly get sex from 8/10 men. Whereas women will only find a narrow percentage of men physically hot. Their preferences are very narrow - limited usually to tall, muscular, handsome face, white skin.

On dating apps, I was informed on this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/cwo1i4/how_much_sex_and_female_attention_are_the_top_20/that it's not 80/20 anymore. It's more like 80/5. In other words, 80% of women are going after 5% of the men. Dating apps are almost solely looks based, with a short bio/profile section.

OkCupid shows that the bio/profile section has no effect on people's opinions of you

OkCupid also shows that personality is equivalent to looks, with better looking people rated to have better personalities