I find it telling too.
My belief is that it's all about justification. At some point they have used, or are using women. In order to deal with the cognitive dissonance of thinking about themselves as Nice Guys, they either have to make the women evil or the trade good. They tried for thousands of years to paint the women as evil (and still do pretend we're doing that). But it doesn't fly any more. So they have to paint the trade as good, or at least the least worst version of it. In order to do that they have to force other people to believe a number of clearly nonsensical things:
That women enjoy having multiple sexual partners a day (who they wouldn't shag except for the money) but at the same time that women are frigid and that's why men have to use sex workers.
That women are safer working together in smaller groups, self-managing but ignoring that when legalisation occurs, we end up with mega brothels run by men.
That sex work doesn't result in trauma but that the only way to prevent the non-existent trauma is decriminalisation.
That sex work involves the women actively choosing this work and that they aren't pimped and trafficked while simultaneously believing that the only want to prevent pimping and trafficking is women organising together in a decriminalisation scenario (see above re mega brothels).
It's work like any other job. Except no other job requires you to insert biohazard into your body, without effective PPE. In any Health and Safety work you learn to look at how to prevent harm. If a task is inherently dangerous, and this is, before you consider PPE or other protections, you first consider stopping the task altogether. Only essential tasks, that require the danger, move on to guards and PPE. There is no other non-essential job like this. And the only reason men want us to believe that it is because they believe sex with unwilling women is essential.
And my favourite, that drugs and sex being sold are analogous. Let's go down that road. Pimps and traffickers are dealers. That one is easy. Addicts are, now hold on, this one is interesting... Addicts are the users of the 'product', so punters. They are compelled by trauma and circumstances to use the product. Hmm, that sounds like the sex workers though. And what are the drugs? Vaginas, mouths and anuses? OK that can't be right. In this scenario you have to decriminalise the punters/addicts by making a clean, safe supply of vaginas/drugs available. That sounds really not OK since women are attached to the vaginas.
OK maybe the women are the addicts in this example. We want to decriminalise them while understanding that drugs (in this case the punters) are harmful and addictive. So we need to make the supply of punters safe and clean. OK but the punters are neither safe, nor are they clean. So that's impossible. I'm fully in favour of decriminalisation of drugs and have said so on here a few times. If I advance search the men on this thread, will I numerous threads about decriminalisation of drugs? Or is the analogy only so men can have sex with unwilling women?