Long post. I hope I've managed to express this stuff clearly, I feel like I'm leaving stuff out, but I guess we can get to whatever that is when it comes up.

I don't think it's bad to analyze social phenomena.

Neither does anyone else. It's just that if one actually analyses social phenomena instead of consciously or subconsciously taking the opportunity to judge/play ploitics, one pisses off many, many people very quickly.

... What I am saying is, I will not become angry if someone "actually analyses social phenomena". I do not think it is bad. That is not the issue.

I do think it's bad to engage in or endorse (unwanted) sexually manipulative behavior.

I summon HughRistik! But even if I were to accept manipulation as a natural kind, which I don't, rather than as a continuum with communication and influence, where are you going to draw the line?

This seems disingenuous. It looks like you're saying, essentially, "Ah, but nothing has inherent meaning!". Are you unable to understand the concept of "manipulation" in non-technical terms?

(As an aside: following the pattern "Even if I thought X were an A rather than a B, something something," typically one treats X as an A rather than a B.)

I also think it's bad to equate distaste for unwanted sexually manipulative behavior with distaste for analysis.

PUA is up there with psychology, sales and marketing in the ranks of useful insights into how people actually work. It is unfortunate that there are some desperate misogynists among them, but if one is to denounce it then sales, marketing, PR, they all gotta burn too.

As I understand it, people did not on the whole have a problem with the PUA discussion because some pick-up artists are misogynists, but rather because of the parts of the discussion that weren't analysis but were instead themselves casually misogynistic or exclusionary or clueless or whatever. Like, for example, "with women, you have to pretend that they don't have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)", or "bayes tells us we should all bang hot chicks".

It's partially a PR thing, but PR isn't just waving your hands about in a mystical pattern to calm people down - it's also about effectively communicating. You don't want the most rational response to your comments to be "this person rejects sexual equality", for example.