I forget who it was, but a while back someone here posted a plausible explanation as to why so many dudes get sucked into the PUA garbage. Something about how re-framing sexual relationships as a "game" with "rules" and "strategies" makes it more digestible for the kind of shy, awkward nerds who really just want a girlfriend but have no idea how to get one.
They don't necessarily want to objectify/commodify women, but they've been led to believe that women are all somehow so completely different from themselves that they can't approach them as fellow human beings. The narrative of how men and women are different is so vigorously beaten into us from a very young age that it sometimes takes some serious effort to de-program that bullshit.
Probably the first and foremost thing that needs to be explained to these kinds of guys is that framing sexual relationships as somehow inherently adversarial is kind of completely fucked up.
