I don't think it's a straw man argument. Yes if a woman is wearing a nice dress and a pair of Crocs, that's an issue, but from what I've seen the marginal effect of shoes is pretty small from most men's perspectives. My impression, both from personal experience and from popular culture, is that women actually notice accessories and men do not. That sounds like signaling towards women; in fact, women I know who spend a lot on accessories have admitted as much to me. If someone has actually gathered hard data on this, I can't find it and would love to see it, but I'd be really surprised if women who shop for accessories seriously are doing so to attract men.
I just haven't yet heard a convincing explanation why women would benefit from signaling high status to each other.
So? The behaviour either happens or it doesn't. Your ability to explain it is totally irrelevant. Granted my evidence is undesirably anecdotal, so you may have not seen evidence that women buy accessories for other women to see. Still, the fact that you can't explain it (especially that you can't explain it with ev-psych specifically) does not preclude or remove the event from existence. I'd still believe men have nipples even if I couldn't figure out how it were evolutionarily advantageous.
But I'll try to offer an explanation (and an alternative). People seek social status. That simple. Women may also want to signal friendliness and caring (they're not opposed to status), but they benefit strongly from being high-status. Similarly, it may simply be a social thing. My parents encouraged me to dress one way and not another. Clothing is a significant indicator of social status. Thus, people come to believe a certain style is "right," and what style that is does a lot to signal what social niche they come from. This lets the whole thing operate without any consciousness of signaling.
An alternative. People value looking good for obvious reasons. The only evaluation they can make of "looking good" is by their own criteria, thus they seek primarily to look good to themselves. Thus, if some women like accessories, they will seek them out seriously, because they want to look good and they view them as vital to achieving that end, even if men don't agree.
Hah. Neither of your offered explanations discriminates between men and women (the first one would actually imply men dressing up more, because men have more to gain from status), and neither explains why women consciously try to stand out from the group when dressing up, e.g. get upset when they see some other woman dressed identically (both explanations would imply the reverse reaction). My obvious explanation of sexual selection accounts for both.
Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support, but usually after I or, more rarely, someone else sounds the alarm, and usually without much persistence or apparent investment. There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems, which does nothing to disincentivize being piggish around here - some people seem to earnestly care about the problem, but this isn't enforced by the community at large, it's just a preexisting disposition (near as I can tell).
I would like help reducing the incidence of:
We could use more of the following:
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.