In my experience, Americans seem to believe that women are intrinsically more beautiful than men, with women getting called beautiful on a regular basis, while the same types of compliments are not extended to men with anywhere near the same frequency. Instead of articulating that some men are more beautiful than some women and that some women are more beautiful than some men (although perceptions of what makes someone beautiful are purely subjective), which is logically true since different men and women have different physical appearances, American people often fallaciously elevate female beauty over male beauty. The fact that women get complimented on their physical appearances more than men do just demonstrates the sexist nature of what many Americans seem to believe (again, as far as I can tell in my experience) about beauty.
The way that my culture treats female beauty as more common or more important than male beauty may have a great deal to do with another asinine cultural belief, the belief that men are hypervisual/hypersexual beings. In this context, the fallacious belief that women are more beautiful than men, combined with the utterly illogical American tendency to view beauty and the human body as sexual, takes on the added errors of feeding into a larger societal lie that tells men that they are "wired" to have a massive need to visually admire women or that they are "wired" to sexually objectify women.
Since many compliments about a woman's physical appearance can be totally random and gratuitous, it is as if the people who constantly tell women that they are beautiful seem to believe that women are beautiful or deserve to be called beautiful simply because they are women. This is, of course, entirely fallacious and unbiblical, with the Bible calling both individual men and women beautiful and never teaching some absurd gender-based hierarchy of the physical beauty of men and women [1]. It does not follow from a person being a woman that she is physically beautiful, and it does not follow from someone being a man that he is not physically beautiful or that he is less beautiful than a woman.
Women don't care about their bodily appearances, at all or to a high degree, just because they are women, and the deep desire to be physically beautiful is not foreign to men just because they are men. As in all other things, gender stereotypes about personality traits are false, fallacious, and harmful. Men may care deeply about being beautiful and being seen as beautiful by others, although they may not verbalize this due to societal pressures or conditioning. I myself care a lot about being physically beautiful, though I care far more about my intellectual pursuits than I do about beauty. Other members of my culture would likely insist in general that being beautiful isn't a top priority of mine because I'm a man, though.
And when people don't challenge these erroneous beliefs about beauty, some people fallaciously conclude that women are more beautiful than men because they are often told that or have it implied to them, and the tendency to encourage use of makeup by women (but not men) reflects this belief, as does the tendency for women's clothing to be more colorful and sensuous than clothing for men. None of these things make the belief that women are more beautiful than men true, though! The belief rests on nothing but fallacies based on arbitrary cultural leanings.
The practice of regularly calling women beautiful, given the way it is applied, is sexist towards males just like many expected dating practices are [2]. It is an example of benevolent sexism [3], which, although more socially-accepted, remains entirely sexist. Yet another double standard that one can see in how my culture treats men and women, it demonstrates, as do many other things, the infantile reasoning easily found in American society.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-beauty-of-both-genders.html
[2]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/12/sexist-dating-traditions.html
[3]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/benevolent-sexism.html
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