To some extent I agree with you, because that does tend to be the case.
Or well... The case tends to be that feminine gear/ clothes is removed and masculine is treated as '' the default/ gender-neutral ''.
However I think the devs in FFXIV don't have that approach, I think it's mostly a Western thing and probably has a lot to do with how male dominated gaming and nerdy stuff has been.
And in Japan there wasn't this trend of hyper masculinity in the sense of the West ( ultra muscle men oiled up with machine guns and explosions pewpewpew ).
Femininity is more generally accepted.
It does happen in Asian games when they try to pander to the West tho, or when localization teams decide to start tampering with things.
But that doesn't rly happen in FFXIV either.
I think that even if they made the gear unlocked to everyone it'd still stay the same.
However, I also do think there is truth to the notion that most people who wear feminine gear and clothes on male characters do it as a joke.
Which gets into what I said above, I actually think that gender norms when it comes to men are FAR more rigid than with women even tho people often say the opposite.
A lot of men unironically feel insecure and emasculated by even something as simple as the notion of washing their face with face wash...
Women obviously do get shamed to some extent, but I do think it's far more extreme with men especially in modern culture.
Why not the reverse tho?
Pants are already in the OVERWHELMING majority in the game.
Like why is the pants considered the '' true '' version there, especially when in reality a skirt adds more variety than the pants do.
Edit:
In fairness, a lot of the gear that drops from the Nier raid does fill that.
The 2B gear is more like a fun reference and 2B's design is ultimately more popular than say 9S.
It'd be cool to have gotten both but they also designed all of the other gear too, so I am more forgiving of it.
I mean in that scenario the 9S gear would've been what was to appease a minority, and some of the gear already is very similar from the Nier raids. It's pretty easy to cosplay him already while cosplaying 2B would've been more difficult.
Pants were not unisex historically and still aren't in many countries.
In some countries women wearing jeans is even seen as EXTREMELY sexual and heavily demonized.
And neither were skirts seen as feminine, even in some cultures today men wear skirts.
Point being, these things change.
And maybe we could with a bit less rigid standards.
The whole thing with masculinity and mens gender norms being considered '' gender-neutral/ unisex '' has a lot to do with how women have been shut out of public spaces and not had much of a role outside of the household in fairly recent history.
Combined with rather harshly forced gender norms for men too.
Again I don't disagree with the notion that most will do it as a joke, but a lot of people won't and I think it stops being '' funny '' at some point the more it's normalized.
The same way that women wearing masculine clothes have been somewhat normalized.
Which people absolutely did view as hilarious and shocking.
So you don't actually want more options?
This is just about what you want.
Because you're telling them to stop doing something that doesn't fit your taste instead of just creating both and unlocking it right now.
Calling options you don't like childish etc and getting into rants about modesty is also totally unnecessary in this discussion.
It muddies the water and makes it sound like you're just interested in ranting against clothing that goes against your taste.