Where is your systemic approach and optimization in this example? You haven't given any information on the approach other than find pleasure points. That's not using systems and optimization, so no it's not dehumanizing.

If on the other hand you carefully studied adult films, read the kama sutra, and practiced this at every opportunity you might have a systemic approach. And if your partner learned about this I don't think anyone could be called silly for feeling dehumanized by it. This is basically the approach that most people take to some extent, but that doesn't mean you want to advertise how you looked at a huge population and deduced effective methods of sexual pleasure. Of course some men or women may have no problem with this approach, but that is highly dependent on the individual and many people would feel dehumanized by it or uncomfortable with it. Sex is actually a good example because there are often strong personal feelings, even love associated with it.

Again it might be counter-intuitive, like how else are people supposed to figure these things out? But at the same time that fact can be very dehumanizing and seem disrespectful to disclose your "process" if it involved a lot of systematic optimization. Not very lovey dovey.

Not porn and Kamasutra in particular, but yeah I’ve read books, blogs, Reddit, ... definitely experimented a bit (not at every opportunity though).

Just because people cringe at some information doesn’t make the whole thing dehumanizing. You’re right though that most people don’t want to know how the sausage / burger is made...

I agree if someone goes about this approach and is respectful of everyone along the way it's not necessarily dehumanizing and there's nothing wrong with it, but regardless it may feel dehumanizing to the person to find out about since that's more about recognizing and optimizing patterns, and less about their individual uniqueness.

For most people it's not really that extreme and to some extent this has to be allowed for. That's the tricky part especially with sex, you want someone who is good at it, but that typically comes with experience. That may make some people uncomfortable. Find a good balance and just call it what it is, young people living life. But it's also a good warning to not "over optimize" and spend all your time going down that route because then some people would rightfully question that kind of behavior. I know I don't want a partner with thousands of sexcapades.

> That's the tricky part especially with sex, you want someone who is good at it, but that typically comes with experience.

My experience is different. Not very extensive, so I don't want to generalize it... but what I've learned is, that experimentation (i.e. systemic approach to exploration) trumps experience. It's true what they say, "every woman is different" (well, maybe not every, but there's a surprising (to me) amount of variance) so what works for one doesn't (necessarily) work for another. I don't think that experience (as in each additional partner) has really given me anything except maybe confidence.