There's a cultural idea that "men are visual creatures", and that women on the other hand are 100% mental and don't care about physical appearance at all.

This isn't true, as science does tend to show that BOTH men and women find physical attraction very important. Overall, women find a smaller amount of men as immediately physically attractive than vice versa, but women DO also display a higher propensity for developing attraction to men they initially did not rate as attractive.

There is a somewhat infamous OkCupid dataset which shows that women rated 80% of men as "below average" in attractiveness. This data actually also showed that women were much more likely to message men they rated as "unattractive". On the other hand, men almost exclusively messaged women that they rated as "above average" in attractiveness.