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fubarobfusco comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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Biology doesn't dictate your values. Avoid the naturalistic fallacy.
For instance, even if the descriptive claims that PUAs make about women's desires were true, this would not make it right to demean women.
It is surely the case that women and men have morally significant biological differences. Perhaps the biggest of these is pregnancy and childbirth — the vastly greater cost that women bear in childbearing. However, it would be the naturalistic fallacy to claim that women should bear this cost (e.g. that the creation of artificial wombs would not be a moral improvement); and it would be rationalization of misogyny to claim that women should be treated as baby-makers.
(Tim Wise makes a related argument about why it's silly for progressives to worry too much about race-IQ research: we don't believe that smart people have more political rights than average people, so even if it were shown that one racial group were on average smarter than another, this wouldn't change anyone's commitments to political equality.)
I'm not sure what you mean by demean women. Do you mean that to even make truthful observations that could make a woman feel bad is wrong?
I'm not sure what treated as baby makers means. I think it entirely reasonable, in this universe without well functioning artificial wombs, to take as a default that women will bear children, even to have incentives towards such. I like humans existing.
I don't know what your footnote references.
No.
Some descriptive claims associated with the PUA memeplex seem to come with an addendum that could be crudely rendered as "... and therefore, women are your inferiors." Women are manipulable; therefore, you have the right to manipulate them. Women desire approval, therefore, you should manipulate their desire for approval to get sex out of them that they may otherwise not want to have. And so on.
(To make a geek analogy: "Their server has a security vulnerability; therefore, they are morons and you should hack them and take all their stuff.")
Perhaps I should have said "treated merely as baby-makers"; as opposed to thinkers, dreamers, desirers, planners, possessors of values and goals, colleagues, rivals, partners — you know, people.
Blaaah ... that's because I removed the sentence it was a footnote to, and didn't remove the footnote. Edited.