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Alicorn comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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I think an outright moratorium on PUA discussion is probably the most practical of the acceptable results. If the people inclined to talk about PUA had the skills and sensitivity necessary to separate the appropriate methods from the inappropriate ones, then this problem would probably be moot in the first place. I said specifically:
These non-depersonalizing methods (or at least, methods which can be used by non-depersonalizers) exist. pjeby mentioned one a while ago that consisted of a greeting, a couple of sentences, and a straightforward request; there is nothing dishonest or intrinsically objectifying about that, and if I could rely on PUA-discussion-inclined people to confine discussions to non--depersonalizing ways of achieving their (not inherently immoral) goals, I'd back off.
Sadly, I cannot rely on that.
As long as that moratorium applied equally to denigrations of PUA and related concepts, I'd be fine with it myself. Virtually all my comments on the subject are attempts to correct ignorance and stereotyping (or less often, to answer questions), so stopping the stereotyping would eliminate my desire to correct said stereotyping.
(Not that I claim to speak for anyone else's feelings about the matter. Just saying I'd be fine with a moratorium, because I'm not the one who keeps bringing the subject up.)
It's a bit of a cliche, but I don't think techniques depersonalize people. People depersonalize people. It's a rare PUA technique that falls unequivocally into one camp or another, because people can do the same thing with different attitudes or for different reasons.
As far as "techniques" go in any case, some PUGs have said that, apart from honesty, confidence, and other "inner" issues, the most important things to learn are social and logistical skills, like how to gracefully handle her friends' concerns about you, set up other meeting times, etc. But these basic and pragmatic qualities and skills are unlikely to be a topic of heated discussion on LessWrong!
The nature of the PUA topic is that discussion will be biased towards the sensational and the controversial, since to the extent everybody agrees that honesty and confidence and basic social skills are good, we don't see any reason to talk about all that.
Thus, the only things that get talked about here are:
The bad things that outsiders have heard about, but don't always know much about, and
The things some insiders believe outsiders get wrong about "women" or "dating" or whatever
And I don't actually like either #1 OR #2 showing up here, because #2 usually consists of overzealous, immature, borderline-misogynistic babblings about how terrible conventional views of relationships are and why guys shouldn't be "nice", and occasionally attacking honesty as a poor policy.
In its own way, this is just as ignorant as the things in category #1, except that the people in group #2 really ought to know better. So then I end up wasting a lot of trying to educate (or just arguing with) both groups... something I could just as easily do without.