That is how the clients of sex workers are being characterized in the comments on this post. I don't have a lot of time to react to that right now but it troubles me deeply. In a post about compassion and fighting repression drawing that sort of line in the sand just heaps stigma on the people that patronize sex workers for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes other sex bloggers come to me and ask how they can get into the phone sex business. The number one thing I tell them is to respect their clients, deeply and truly, as human beings. They will get that respect echoed back to them ten-fold. I've had a few clients that were real turds but we all meet assholes every day of our lives.
The problem present in discussions like the one I'm linking to above is that it rests on two assumptions:
1. That the clients of sex workers cannot and are not having sexual activity other than with the sex worker.
2. There is something inherently wrong with paying for sexual fulfilment and paying proves that you cannot "get it for free."
The experience of countless sex workers I've spoken to implies that this simply isn't the case. So, just like I bristle when activists paint sex workers with a broad stroke as a huddled mass of the most depressed, exploited, and disenfranchised parts of humanity, I am equally concerned by similar stereotypes about sex worker clients. They are neither all abusive, hateful, patriarchs nor are they ugly, ostracized and socially inept. Some may appear from either of those flavors but the rest characterize a full spectrum of human conditions and personalities as well as motivations for paying for sexual gratification.
A few less sweeping generalizations might do us all a bit of good in this situation and a few more people that are willing to step up and proudly discuss their experience with sex workers.
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Comments
That being said, to state that the clients of sex workers are being characterized as "ugly, ostracized and socially inept," is a misleading description of the type of discussion going on in my linked post.
The phrase was brought up in one comment by RickyB and I reused the phrase in my response to his remark.
The post above the comments section that you refer to primarily advocates the need for a more liberalized sex education system--one that I believe will lead to a less sexually repressed society.
I think that a more sexually enlightened society will more often reject the idea of sex as a commodity, which will in turn reduce the size of sex industry and the number of problems associated with the sex industry.
Ricky B used the "ugly, ostracized and socially inept" (unfair) characterization to make a point: the sex industry will never totally go away--even if everyone is completely sexually enlightned/liberated/etc. It was merely a hypothetical remark and frankly not at all relevant to the discussion taking place in the rest of those comments.
I did not in any way mean that people who go (or have gone) to hookers are ugly, or can't get laid. I mean, there's Charlie Sheen and... well, let's just say some others I know :-)