Charlotte Perkins Gilman has a lot to say about the perverted sexual selection in humans and man-made "beauty" in her works. For example, in her Our Androcentric Culture, or the Man-Made World (Ch. 3) she writes:

The second answer is that much of what man calls beauty in woman is not human beauty at all, but gross overdevelopment of certain points which appeal to him as a male. The excessive fatness, previously referred to, is a case in point; that being considered beauty in a woman which is in reality an element of weakness, inefficiency and ill-health. The relatively small size of women, deliberately preferred, steadfastly chosen, and so built into the race [i.e., species], is a blow at real human progress in every particular. In our upward journey we should and do grow larger, leaving far behind us our dwarfish progenitors. Yet the male, in his unnatural position as selector, preferring for reasons both practical and sentimental, to have "his woman" smaller than himself, has deliberately striven to lower the standard of size in the race. We used to read in the novels of the last generation, "He was a magnificent specimen of manhood"—"Her golden head reached scarcely to his shoulder"—"She was a fairy creature—the tiniest of her sex." Thus we have mated, and yet expected that by some hocus pocus the boys would all "take after their father," and the girls, their mother. In his efforts to improve the breed of other animals, man has never tried to deliberately cross the large and small and expect to keep up the standard of size.

As a male he is appealed to by the ultra-feminine, and has given small thought to effects on the race. He was not designed to do the selecting. Under his fostering care we have bred a race of women who are physically weak enough to be handed about like invalids; or mentally weak enough to pretend they are—and to like it. We have made women who respond so perfectly to the force which made them, that they attach all their idea of beauty to those characteristics which attract men; sometimes humanly ugly without even knowing it.

https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3015/pg3015-images.html

And in Women and Economics (Ch. 2),

When, then, it can be shown that sex-distinction in the human race is so excessive as not only to affect injuriously its own purposes, but to check and pervert the progress of the race, it becomes a matter for most serious consideration. Nothing could be more inevitable, however, under our sexuo-economic relation. By the economic dependence of the human female upon the male, the balance of forces is altered. Natural selection no longer checks the action of sexual selection, but co-operates with it. Where both sexes obtain their food through the same exertions, from the same sources, under the same conditions, both sexes are acted upon alike, and developed alike by their environment. Where the two sexes obtain their food under different conditions, and where that difference consists in one of them being fed by the other, then the feeding sex becomes the environment of the fed. Man, in supporting woman, has become her economic environment. Under natural selection, every creature is modified to its environment, developing perforce the qualities needed to obtain its livelihood under that environment. Man, as the feeder of woman, becomes the strongest modifying force in her economic condition. Under sexual selection the human creature is of course modified to its mate, as with all creatures. When the mate becomes also the master, when economic necessity is added to sex-attraction, we have the two great evolutionary forces acting together to the same end; namely, to develope sex-distinction in the human female. For, in her position of economic dependence in the sex-relation, sex-distinction is with her not only a means of attracting a mate, as with all creatures, but a means of getting her livelihood, as is the case with no other creature under heaven. Because of the economic dependence of the human female on her mate, she is modified to sex to an excessive degree. This excessive modification she transmits to her children; and so is steadily implanted in the human constitution the morbid tendency to excess in this relation, which has acted so universally upon us in all ages, in spite of our best efforts to restrain it. It is not the normal sex-tendency, common to all creatures, but an abnormal sex-tendency, produced and maintained by the abnormal economic relation which makes one sex get its living from the other by the exercise of sex-functions. This is the immediate effect upon individuals of the peculiar sexuo-economic relation which obtains among us.

https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57913/pg57913-images.html

Yep. Also I find it illogical how your average bloke is obsessed with signalling how much he loves the female body and how much of a macho heterosexual womanizer he is but in reality they express repulsion towards natural female bodies. They are only attracted to women who modified their female bodies in a way that it looks less female and more artificial (labiaplasty because men think labia minora are ugly, plastic breast implants because they think normal female breasts are not simulating enough, tons of make up, hair removal, and other cosmetics because they don't find female features attractive enough in their natural state. Another example is people claiming short haired or bald women are automatically ugly. However if a person's face is attractive it will obviously remain attractive even if there's not much hair to frame it... Plus in my experience women's attractive facial features are often even more prominent when they have very short hair. While men almost always look improved with long hair because their faces are usually plain or ugly. Sorry I don't know how much sense that makes...

I've always thought that femininity was a form/collection of class signals, that has mutated into being assumed as natural. Only a wealthy woman would have the time and effort necessary to keep up with trends, to mold her body and features to whatever is popular at the time. Look at the hair, it's very high maintenance. Think about how much money it takes to regularly dye and style that hair, think about the tools and products.

I was born into a working class family, and I've tried in the past to conform, because I'm very well aware of the social benefits of following a social script and conforming. That's what I think when I see this.

I both agree and disagree with this. The woman on the right who has removed her body hair is exaggerating a difference between women and men. The great majority of women produce finer body hair than men do; it's lighter and less visible. So, removing it entirely enhances this difference and signals in the direction of "female." Heterosexual men can be aroused by an exaggeration of this difference, simply because they are using a brain hardwired to detect this difference for mating purposes. In other words, some of the lizard brain is involved and it's the lizard brain reacting rather than necessarily a "fetish."

Similarly, in catering to the male gaze by emphasizing these male/female differences, women may be using their lizard brain as well, propelled by the urge to attract a male in order to mate and reproduce. It isn't necessarily all patriarchy and oppression.

But I do agree that within the context of male supremacy/patriarchy, normal male/female mating strategies can get mutated and warped into something quite nightmarish.

This reminded me of something fascinating I read in Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein's book, A Hunter-Gather's Guide to the 21st Century:

The moose’s antlers, and the fights that they have, and the fact of female choice—these are all sexually selected characters. The egg incubation behavior of male American jacanas—this, too, is sexually selected. The radically different size of male and female elephant seals, the fact that only male frogs call, and the fact that from peacocks to quetzals to mallards, males have far showier plumage than females—all sexual selection.

In no other species of primate do breasts persist when there are no babies around to benefit. Human breasts are sexually selected, and they are doing more than feeding babies. They are also advertisements to men—just as a lyrebird’s song and a rutting boar’s smell and a red-capped manakin’s dance are advertisements to the females of those species.

What else is sexually selected in humans? Flowers on her birthday. Neckties. Fast cars. Makeup and heels and jewelry. Indeed, the physical ornamentation of women—including not just makeup and heels and jewelry, but also breasts that stay enlarged throughout our reproductive cycles—is an indicator of partial sex-role reversal in humans.

What does that mean? Whereas most animal species exhibit male-male competition and female choice of mates, a species with partial sex-role reversal, such as we have, will also show competition between females and male choice of mates. This can manifest as anything from women advertising to attract the attention of men to outright brawls between women. Men, not coincidentally, will also be more likely to be in a position to choose their partners.