If you have anatomical feature X, and someone pushes a button to increase the utility of all people having feature X

This assumes some correlation between anatomical feature X and a term in a person's utility function.

Based on your comment and this exchange, it's not clear to anyone what exactly are we talking about (my first question was "What do you mean?" for a reason). The conflict I took as the topic of the conversation is generally the direction of change in balance of influence (i.e. status) between partners or potential partners in a relationship from the default established by social status quo.

If you reason in CDT style, then the only effect of increasing your own influence is improvement of your experience in your present relationship. (Incidentally, I don't see how your sex is relevant to the character of this activity, the salient category seems to be simply your own person.) This way of thinking seems to explain your discussion in this thread best (correct me if you were in fact assuming something else).

Alternatively, if we are talking about influencing the social status quo, then from the (narrow) point of view of any potential heterosexual relationship, you win from the improvement in relevant aspects of background status of your own sex. It would be obvious that the result of such shift is beneficial overall only if you focus primarily on egoistic value effects of its consequences, ignoring the effect lowered background status has on all of women (which is huge scope). This is essentially the sense which I assumed in making this comment. (This works the other way as well, i.e. the effect worsened relationship experience would have on all of men.)

The reason the first looks like the second to me is that from TDT perspective even the personal decisions you make in influencing the course of your own relationship, without intentionally meddling with the global status war, have global effects through decisions made by other people for similar reasons. If you decide to pursue greater influence in your own relationship, this allows you to infer that other people would behave similarly, which makes for a greater damage to opposite sex's values than just your partner's.

So even if we make the reasonable assumption that you hold your own immediate preferences in greater value than other people's, and so you'd be inclined to bargain in your own direction, the combination of possibly greater marginal value of improvement for the other sex with nontrivial scope of the decision makes it non-obvious.

The rest rests on the factual and moral questions of who gets how much greater marginal benefit from shifts in the current default status quo influence. There seem to be convincing arguments for both sexes.

Actually, I quite deliberately didn't argue anything, because I wasn't even sure that I understood what claim you were making.

Instead, I attempted to make my inferences explicit, asked for confirmation, and asked for clarification on the piece that remained unclear to me. (I'd still sort of like those things.)

So it's not surprising that you can't figure out what I'm arguing with, though it's a little puzzling that you assumed I was arguing with anything at all. Re-reading my comment I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

Anyway: I agree that the willingness of my partners doesn't change whether I like sex more than no-sex or vice-versa.

And I'm not sure why it matters, but just to be clear: if I take "I like X more than Y" in a situation to mean that I estimate that I prefer the actual X in that situation to the counterfactual Y, then I've had sex I liked more than no-sex, I've had sex I liked less than no-sex, I've had no-sex I liked more than sex, and I've had no-sex I liked less than sex.

Edit: Um. Apparently the comment I was replying to got deleted while I was replying to it. Never mind, then?

The sides are "those who condemn (so as to discourage) the use of pickup" and "those who see nothing wrong with pickup".

Forgive me, but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle (it's possible you do not ascribe to there being just two sides, but you are unclear on this point).

The "sides" as I see it also include, at the very least:

"those who condemn certain common practices of pickup that deliberately harm other people, but are fine with (or even encourage) other practices that are not"

You may be right... the reason I made my inferences explicit was precisely so that we can be clear about this stuff, rather than move forward as if we were talking about the same thing when we aren't.

That said, I was responding to the sentence: "The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the victim," which seemed to be what Nancy was responding to.