The point is that from what I heard Hungary is a culture where someone whose "interest in women is loving them, being loved by them, and making love, in that order" has a chance of winding up with a woman.

This IMHO works in every culture, Anglo ones including, you just have to ignore the party b...es and go for the intelligent and non-crazy. Usually it means training yourself to be not too focused on cover-girl looks and be okay with stuff like no makeup. As a theoretical example, consider how would you pick up Megan McArdle - she writes, sounds and looks a lot like my past girlfriends, and Suderman looks and sounds broadly like the same kind of guy I am. This just a hunch, though.

However I fully agree that my dating experience in the UK was worse than in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia or Serbia. (Lived in some places and went to all kinds of meditation camps in the others.) And perhaps it would be worse in the US too. This is largely because I can tolerate things like no make-up, no heels, body hair etc. but I cannot really deal with obesity, and that means playing in a shrinking and increasingly competitive market. Yet, on the whole, my UK experience was not so bad either. On speed dating events in Birmingham, there was a non-fat, intelligent, friendly, considerate 15-20% always.

What do you mean by "objectifies". I've yet to see a coherent explanation of the concept that doesn't boil down to "applying Baysian (or any) reasoning to humans is evil".

This is that simple basic Kantian thinking that got deeply incorporated into the cultural DNA of the West centuries ago, this why I don't understand what is in not to understand about. It is about primarily treating people as ends and only secondarily and cautiously as means. It is about understanding humans have a faculty of reason and thus autonomy. What follows from this? Autonomy means people can decide to be different from each other, and thus be really cautious with generalizations and stereotypes - perhaps, cultural ones are still okay, because socialization is a powerful thing, but gender is not a culture. Second, and more important, the ends not means stuff means not seeing sex as a prize to be won by an active, driven men and women just passively hand it out as a reward for the effort, but as an mutually initiated, mutually desired interaction between two autonomous beings with their own desires. It would be useful to read a bit around on the Pervocracy blog about this.

Objectification is not necessarily sexual and it is really an old idea, not some later day SJW fashion. It is treating people as means. Marx argued that in a 19. century factory the proletarian is objectified into being treated like a human machine. This may or may not be true, but an example of the idea. Or if you look at how people realized maybe slavery is not such a good idea, a large part of this was this old Kantian idea that a human should not use a human as a mere tool, without regard to the will of the other human. Rather if we want people to work for us, we should negotiate with them a price on an equal level, acquire consent, and make sure both got our will satisfied in the transaction. This is the same idea. But objectification is gradual, it is not a binary switch - one could argue employment in a hierarchical business is still more so than being an entrepreneur.

An object is simply something that does not have own goals, it is the object of desire, or the tool to achieve other desires with, of other people. If you understand what being a person, what personhood means, well, objectification is just a denial of it.

I must stress it is not some kind of a far-left ideology, it is something a traditional gentleman from 1900 would understand. Persoonhood is a through and through traditional Christian idea, one of the central concepts of Christian philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood#Christianity and objectification is just whatever denies it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectification

Similarly, I would not say objectifying people is a traditional, conservative thing. Just because feminists fight it it does not mean it is so - reversed stupidity is not intelligence, reversed progressivism is not traditionalism. If you look up Roger Scruton's Right-Hegelian philosophy of sex, it is very decently non-objectifying.

I would say objectification is largely a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon in an age where machines and processes are so predominant that we tend to see people like them, too, and the essence of personhood - intellect and will - gets ignored.

I would also say mass gunpowder armies played an important role in objectifying people.

Sexual objectification is simply a subset of this generic trend.

Another useful resource is existentialists like Sartre, "The Other".

Care to explain what you think the two sets of motives are?

The intelligent asshole will perhaps present a bogus physical theory to gain status - but the arguments will be about a commonly understood, verifiable thing outside himself. But a social theory will not be about a thing, it will be essentially about himself, something only he really knows and we can just guess.

Running good epistemology on human concerns, social concerns is highly desirable but incredibly hard becasue we cannot separate the observer from the observed.

Interestingly, Rothbard and Austrian Economics have something interesting to say here, the limitations of empiricism about people's behavior. You need repeatable experiments. But if you repeat it with different people, that is not really valid because people are far, far too diverse - remember, autonomy. It is simply wrong in principle to treat beings with intellect and will fungible. If I repeat a behavior experiment with two different groups of people and get something like 62% an 65% do X then of course that means something, but it is not, strictly speaking, the repetition of the experiment. If you repeat it with the same people, you find they learned from the previous experiment rendering the experiment less valid, because not really repeated the same way. So basically we cannot, without brainwashing, repeat experiments in human behavior. Nevertheless at the end of the day we still run experiments with human behavior because just what else can one do? We work with what we have. But the confidence in these things should always necessarily be far lower, for these reasons. The strict repetition criteria is never satisfied.

"objectifies"

I know what you mean, but I think there is a coherent notion in there, along the following lines: 1. Human beings are people, with hopes and fears and plans and preferences and ideas and so forth. 2. Inevitably, some of our thoughts about, and actions toward, other human beings involve more attention to these features of them than others. 3. Something is "objectification" to the extent that we would change it if we attended more to the specifically person-ish features of the other people involved: their hopes, fears, plans, preferences, ideas, etc. (Or: that a decent person would, or that we should. These framings make the value-ladenness of the notion more explicit. Or, and actually this may be a better version than the other three, that they would prefer you to. The fact that on my account there are these different notions of "objectification" isn't, I think, a weakness; words have ranges of meaning.)

So, e.g., consider "treating someone as a sex object", which for present purposes we may take to mean ignoring aspects of them not relevant to sex. If you are currently engaged in having sex with them, this is probably a good thing; on careful consideration of their wants and needs as a person you would probably conclude that when having sex they would prefer you to focus on those aspects of them that are relevant to having sex. On the other hand, if you are in the audience of a seminar they are presenting, you should probably be attending to their ideas about fruit fly genetics or whatever rather than to how they'd look right now with no clothes on; at any rate, that would probably be their preference.