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lessdazed comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong
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It depends on the passage. For example, "Women want men to be better at making them laugh and feel good and get aroused and not be creeped out," applies to basically all women, and also applies to all men but the message from context is that it is generally more important to women than to men. So yes to "all women want X" and "women generally want X more than men want X" but no to "all women want X more than men want X".
One has to assume something from context and insert either "generally", "exclusively", "equally", or whatever, if it isn't explicit. My assumption that the intention was best captured by "generally" was a) the charitable reading b) the most likely reading.
The argument that a sentence could be interpreted as offensive seems like it unfairly ignores the principle of charity.
Is it a definition?
Not consciously.
I'm going to have to let my response to this stew for a bit before it's suitable to post, if I can get the inferential distances reasonable at all.
The short, probably-won't-work, only-posting-it-so-the-above-doesn't-sound-like-an-evasion version is that your assumption that people will automatically parse things like that assumes that such people are at stage 4 (possibly 5) or better of Perry's development theory (or equivalent), and that such an assumption is not safe to make, even here.
The principle of charity forces people to privilege interpretations they consider unlikely, even if they aren't the readings they glean automatically. If their first reading implies that the author is innately evil or incredibly stupid, that indicates reinterpretation is in order.
If your point is that it pattern matches for bad things, OK, Luke is communicating suboptimally in the context of many readers being systematically biased and unfair and other writers using similar words to mean mean things.
You seem to be assuming that people can make such reinterpretations in the way you're looking for. This is not always true. And, even in cases where it is, I suspect that the initial interpretation - the one that's considered most likely - is the one that counts in terms of affecting the person's psychological/emotional state.