Women tend to "passively pursue" males -- they purposefully put themselves out there and attempt to present themselves in a way that gets them noticed. But again this is generalization. It's funny that some people still frown upon women who actively pursue men. The last guy I talked to, it was funny -- when I pushed to meet with him (by suggesting places to go) and seemed too eager, he got really squidgy and I had to back way off before he felt comfortable getting together; it was like he needed to feel like he was the one doing the chasing.
That's not really unusual.
If you think that an alpha male can have as many women as he can protect (from other males
)/resources can support, then the women that are left over are "inferior".
Think of it like a game. You have equal amounts of males and females. In order to have maximum reproductive success, the males want as many high-value females, while the females want the highest value male (they can get). Since males need to both 'support' and 'protect' (read: offspring and mate guarding), it costs them resources in the long run, so they can only "hold onto" so many females at a time. Granted, I'm ignoring the whole slew of tendencies for females to cheat in the system, males poaching others indirectly, etc.
Given that there are equal amounts, this means that some males go without mating - it is unlikely that this is ever the case for women. A male may want to trade up, as in get the maximum use of his resources, but in a choice between no mate and a mate, he'll always pick a mate.
By design, the males have to compete with each other for the females. The females, however, do not have to compete with each other directly. Their strategy is therefore to appeal to the traits the dominant males are seeking. By virtue of evolution, these traits are mostly related to the ability to have children. The resulting tendency is for them to want to appear young and fertile.
The males are less defined because there are mixed strategies, but in all cases, if a female is hunting a male, then she is inherently signalling her inability to have attracted a high-value male. By default, the implication is that all females are 'claimed' - not because it is true, but because that's the heurestics involved. A male would need to challenge and claim another male.
We've grown a lot since this would fully apply, but we still have tendencies like this.
Women, however, have it really bad because they automatically have to rate themselves against other women to determine their value. It's always been a problem for them, but the media does make it worse, to some degree. It means they believe themselves to be less attractive than their "real" competition. Similar effect with males, however, in that males tend to value their mates less after being exposed to "perfect" images. However, it isn't new.
In summary, the short of it is... marriage is the greatest thing for men since the beginning of time. Otherwise the majority of us wouldn't have secured a mate. That, and nature is strangely cruel to women - they all would pretty much get a mate, but have been programmed to feel like they need to be perfect (or better than, I suppose), just so that they want to upgrade/keep their mate.
