An idea I got from feminism is that women are held to a higher beauty standard than men.

I agree with this. I find the evidence abundant. Simply walk out the front door and look around. At least where I live, you tend to see women wearing nice shoes, clean clothes, neat hair and generally well kept appearance.

Look at men on the other hand - it's a mixed picture. Speaking for myself, my shoes are sometimes a bit dirty, my shirt sometimes has sweat stains, my hair isn't always neat and I'm not always clean shaven. (I suppose this varies; lawyers, senior management, etc. in the city might tend to be neater and more formal.)

My question is: who / what maintains this higher standard for women?

For example I don't see any job adverts explicitly stating: "female applicants are expected to have higher beauty standards than male applicants". I know the above might seem like a facile observation – of course no hiring manager is going to publicly admit that they're applying a sexist double-standard.

But it leads me to the question: how is this higher standard maintained then?

What stops all women all over the world from just suddenly lowering their beauty standards?

My understanding based on own thinking and some feminist material is:

• From an early age, through subtle social cues, from both women and men, girls become acculturated to being better presented.
• Media and consumption goods also foster this ideal, e.g. kids TV shows, toys, etc. all push a higher standard onto women.
• Women over the world are not equally educated and aware of feminism, so they might not know that they could (in theory at least) lower their beauty standards.
• Capitalist competition subtly advantages women who adhere to the higher beauty standards, e.g. they get paid more, can find work more easily, have easier social interactions, etc. Women respond to this incentive by maintaining the higher standard.
• Women "beauty-police" each other through social judgement, threat of ostracism (or actual ostracism), mostly in a subtly and non-explicit way (e.g. gossip, ghosting, etc). I've heard this occasionally from women but I'm not sure how widespread it is.
• Men enforce the standard through direct threats of violence and aggression - actually I haven't heard this from feminists, and I'm not quite sure if I buy it, but hey, anything is possible. Maybe there is some kind of secret male beauty police that fines a woman who didn't wash her hair that day or wore the wrong colour combination, etc.
• The men who are attractive to women enforce the standard by withholding relationships from women who don't meet the standard. This seems maybe more plausible, if Hollywood / soap-operas and pop culture generally are anything to go by.

From the above points, is it fair to say that generally the higher beauty standards for women are systemic and socially enforced?

If so, then do men bear collective responsibility for this? And if so, what might men, collectively, do to reduce and hopefully eliminate this double-standard of beauty that burdens women?

Your thoughts would be much appreciated.