I wrote and thought better of a too long response to this. Instead of trying to stay under the TL;DR word limit, I think instead you should focus on answering w

I wrote and thought better of a too long response to this. Instead of trying to stay under the TL;DR word limit, I think instead you should focus on answering why you believe this: "I might still wonder that this is still wrapped up in evolutionary psychology" is a more useful frame of reference than, say, a model of addiction: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28936/w28936.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28936/w289... Do we gain any explanatory power by adding untestable hypotheses to the existing body of work about how society constructs /impossible to realize/ standards for both boys and girls. To your question, yes, girls and boys are socialized differently in our culture, and thus they will be exposed to different social media, pressures, and expectations from the moment they are born. However, I don't think you need to immediately reach for evolutionary psychology to explain this. The underlying pressure, in my view, is the pressure to sell objects that relieve the dissonance that 'influencers' and ad writers amplify. Evolution certainly made us (regardless of gender) susceptible to this kind of influence, but culture determines which of our insecurities weaponized and how. See also: brain pills, protein, and cars for predominantly male audiences. Would these same kinds of pressures have existed in the tribal circumstances under which we evolved? Sure, but they'd have been way way way less potent. I also don't think evo psych tells us that our current societal structures are pre-determined or inevitable. If anything, we've been taught again that human brains are remarkably flexible and even relatively light social pressure from social media can cut against the grain of other fundamental biological tendencies, like self-preservation.