I've read quite a lot of the posts on this thread. There has been a break since the last one but I wanted to add my own two cents.
I do not really know much about the site from the original post but I do have some limited related personal experience. A few months ago I visited a prostitute. I am pondlife scum, I know, and my thoughts are probably not worthy of anyone's attention but I am going to give them.
I am quite socially isolated and lonely. I am trying to change this but I find social interaction very difficult and frustrating. In the time just before I visited a prostitute I was feeling particularly low, I was not suicidal but I was thinking about death quite a lot. I felt in need of some physical contact with another human being. I found someone on the site AdultWork. I do not know the details of her circumstances but she was British, older than me and working from her own house. I felt that she was doing it of her own free will.
I will not go into detail about the meeting but it was perfunctory. I did not really find her very attractive and she did not really try to pretend she found me attractive. We were both just going through the motions. It was very polite and not very erotic. Nevertheless, it had quite a strong positive effect on my mental state. I am hardly happy and contented now but I have not slipped back into quite as dark a place since.
I do sometimes feel disgust at myself for doing it but I would not rule out doing it again. I would much prefer to have a meaningful relationship but that does not currently seem like an option for me.
The attitudes of some of the posters on UKP are awful but they are not restricted to men who use prostitutes. I have heard very misogynistic views from plenty of men who would not. Some of the posters on UKP are very delusional but everyone is guilty of hypocrisy and self-delusion.
I am unsure what I think about prostitution. From my experience, reading things written by people with a lot more experience than me, and looking at other profiles on AdultWork, I am convinced that there are some women who do it through choice, not in desperation. The insistence that they must always be forced by circumstances is probably insulting to some and rather disingenuous, coming from a moral objection in principle to the selling of sex. The majority of people spend a lot of their lives doing things they would not choose in an ideal world to earn a living. Equally there are some profiles on AdultWork that are questionable or definitely set off alarm bells.
Exploitation is reprehensible but our society's current ambivalent approach to prostitution does not help. The grey areas are ripe for, well, exploitation. We need to go one way or the other, either complete prohibition, strictly enforced or acceptance so that things can be a lot more out in the open. As it is, it is legal to pay somebody for sex. Another poster pointed out that nobody has a right to have sex but some people can only have sex by paying for it. It is legal for them to do it and going without sex or physical contact with other human beings for a long time is not good for mental health so perhaps it is not the worst thing in the world that they do it. Clearly they are by definition and probably by their own admission sad and pathetic but perhaps not scum.