A good demonstration of this can be showcased pretty heavily in the difference between how women are dressed in women's magazines vs. in magazines targeting men - whatever their state of undress.
No, both of them began dressing completely differently and the brunet dyed her hair blonde and the blonde dyed her hair red.
They both had this internal script that said "The way you win a man is with looks, by god!" and neither of them ever bothered to ask the man in question "So, what would it take to get you to myself? Is that even possible? Why are even seeing two women in the first place?"
He didn't care how either of them dressed. He continued to see both of them and was quietly amused by their completely ineffectual attempts to "win" him and get him to themselves.
Of course, this is just an anecdote and cases like this are more likely to stick in our memory. You be the judge.
We date. We get married. The people we are romantically attached to in a public way get judged by others and that judgement impacts us.
The only way to separate your actual sexual preferences from your desire for social approval is to get involved secretly, out of the public eye. And that's inherently problematic.
How do you arrange such secrecy? Will it come back to bite you later? Can you successfully transition from secret love affair to public association with this person?
The plot for the movie Legally Blonde is rooted in family interference in Elle's boyfriend's love life. She's gorgeous and they are in love but she's not what his family wants for him.
There are countless other such examples in both fiction and the real world. Hollywood even coined a term for marriages intended to cover up socially disapproved preferences for LGBTQ stars during a certain era: the lavender marriage.
The world often interferes significantly with whom we can marry, which means it interferes significantly with whom we can openly be sexually involved with.
It's a quite difficult thing to escape, even for people who simply cannot make those expectations work for them (like gay men being forced to marry women and pretend to like sex with women, a still fairly common occurrence in the world). If your sexual orientation and preferences make those social expectations not overly onerous, the path of least resistance is to just go along to get along, at least publicly and superficially to some degree.
But I suspect it still does enormous harm in ways that go largely unrecognized.
Ask a number of men what their dream women would be like, and odds are you'll get more descriptions of women we'll sleep with, than will want to stay with long term. Sometimes we'll even known this and still opt for the short term payoff, even if we "in theory" want the long term payoff, because impulse control is hard.
A very attractive female actress once said "I dress for women. I undress for men." For that and other reasons, I'm not convinced that male sexual preferences really drive the female tendency to try hard to look good and dress well, even though that's the supposed justification. Society gives women a lot of silly ideas about what men want and I think most women don't really bother to ask men if any of that actually holds water or not.
When I was relatively young and married I bought a new coat and got all mad when my husband failed to notice my new coat at all and, thus, failed to compliment me on it. I have to wonder how much women go around demanding that men tell them they like and approve of X, Y and Z rather than checking to find out if he even really, truly cares about X, Y or Z at all.
During my long, drawn out divorce at a time when I did not expect to be in a position to make a relationship really work long-term, I just began asking men point blank what they liked about me. The answers were surprisingly varied and completely destroyed a lot of preconceived notions I had about what made me "attractive."
It was very eye-opening and life-changing for me. It also made me enormously skeptical of a lot of "standard wisdom" related to such topics.