Yep, I raised that hypothesis in the latter half of my comment.
Sure, I wanted to point out that it may well explain away the whole effect, leaving the "adaptation that fires when a man is feeling desperate" explanation looking unnecessary — and excluded by Occam. Flirty skills are skills and follow the usual patterns for skills; that they're involved in reproduction doesn't give them any more evopsych fairy dust than (say) language or music. (Which get a lot, but they don't get "being bad at singing is an adaptation".)
I don't wish to rationalize exhibiting low-skill behavior at all.
I didn't think you did — "some folks" was meant to imply "not you, at least not here". But some people do that. See, for instance, Elevatorgate and any number of other cases where folks readily engage in motivated search to find reasons to stick up for the creeper at the expense of the creeped.
One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.
There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.
However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.
Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:
Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:
EDITED TO ADD:
Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)