I think all it implies is that creepiness could be a problem. There have been a number of recent instances -- much discussed online -- where it seems to have been, in the SF and atheist communities; that seems to me plenty enough to explain Douglas's decision to bring it up.
I don't find the analogy with suggesting that an unpopular person shower more very convincing. The main (though not the only) reason is that the dynamics of giving and taking offence seem to me quite different in the two cases, on account of the difference between saying something to one person and saying it to a whole community.
Consider: rather a large fraction of LW's content consists of articles saying "Here is a mistake it's possible to make when thinking. You should probably try not to do that." If you go up to an individual person and say something like that then they're likely to think you're accusing them of making that mistake, and they may well take offence. If you say it publicly to the whole community then no one is being accused of anything and empirically it seems that people don't take offence. Similarly, no one takes the LW articles about akrasia as personal accusations of Not Getting Stuff Done, etc. For that matter, since you use it as an analogy: I've seen articles in LW that said explicitly: "Some people, more of them among people of the sort LW attracts, have poor personal hygiene: you should shower regularly." And, as it turns out, no one seems to have been offended; I don't recall any responses saying "How dare you accuse me of having poor personal hygiene?".
Why take a statement of the form "Some people in our community may do such-and-such a bad thing; let's avoid it" as a personal attack and take offence? It just isn't a personal attack. Not even if it really does mean "Some people in our community actually do do such-and-such a bad thing". -- Not unless someone thinks that actually they, personally, are being attacked (or that someone close to them is) and that the generalized some-people-in-our-community stuff is just a cover. But I haven't heard anyone suggest that anything like that is going on here.
I personally agree that creepiness could be a problem in this community, and was not offended by the article, but I don't see it as unreasonable defensiveness for someone to be offended by the implication that this is a significant problem in the absence of evidence.
This is an issue which, I suspect, a significant number of our members are very conscious of, and take pains to avoid. One effective way to offend people, indeed the way in which I have most recently personally been significantly offended, is lecturing them in the assumption that they're unawar...
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)