So women avoid you like the plague. Duly noted. As such, I'd say your opinion on the matter counts for little if anything.
Some people learn from their experiences of success. Some people learn from their experiences of failure. Some people form opinions just by trying to form an accurate model out of what they hear from other people. I wouldn't say any of those people are incapable of forming an opinion worth listening to. Other things equal, good ideas cause their holder to be successful and bad opinions cause their holder to be unsuccessful, but there's not an extremely strong implication that when a successful person and a failure disagree, the failure is wrong. For example, if an accountant believes that becoming rich and being good at math are easy, and the guy who dropped out of accounting school thinks that both are difficult, that doesn't mean that the dropout is wrong. He could easily be right that most people are too bad at math to make it in accounting school, while the accountant's experiences bias him to believe the opposite.
Unlike you, I enjoy the company of women, and don't view them with suspicion. If I have a nice time with one, then I ask for a second date. Whether she says yes or not, the money spent is a pittance, and certainly not wasted if I had a good time.
I have no problem with the idea that I might spend a pittance on two meals, and have a good time with a woman I like, and it leads to neither sex nor a second date, and it's all worth it. On the other hand, there are plenty of questions that are unsettled from my point of view. For instance, is the rule "the man pays," or "the party who suggested the date pays" a rule that we would want if we were designing the best possible system from scratch? I admit that the proponents can come up with reasons why this rule is fair, or useful, or otherwise advantageous. But there are disadvantages, like the fact that a man may spend his money, he doesn't have a good time by any criterion, and so he still wasted his money--while if the woman doesn't have a good time, she didn't waste her money. And the fact that some men falsely think there's a social contract for sex is also a disadvantage of the system; I don't think they would be confused (I would be far less confused, for that matter) if the universal custom were to go Dutch.
But these may be minor disadvantages that aren't worth complaining about. Maybe the status quo is still the best system. And sometimes we just have to follow the system in place even if it has certain features that are fail the test of reason. So the next question is, do men "have to" follow the system. If they don't like paying for their date's meal, do they face heavy penalties if they insist on going Dutch? By "heavy penalties," I of course mean a greatly reduced chance of getting laid. If you say that most women are equally likely to have sex either way, and Derec thinks that the chances are very low if you go Dutch but reasonably high if you pay, then I can't be sure who's right. Sure, you're a better authority, but arguments from authority are still the weakest kind.
Derec: Not socialize, but fuck.
Completely true. There are plenty of people who can't find someone willing to fuck with them for a reason other than the fact that money's changing hands. Sure, Frikki thinks they're pathetic, but that doesn't mean that they aren't trying their best to be pleasant, and benevolent, and good at forming strategies for social goals like convincing women to have non-prostitution sex. And it doesn't mean that all of them are so pathetic and creepy that they can't find someone to socialize with them for a reason other than that they are offering an explicit payment like that made to a prostitute. It just means that what they should do is keep on trying their best to find non-prostitute partners (making any improvements in their that seem necessary and workable), keep on being with their prostitutes until such time as they become successful, and try to be happy and to be beneficial to everyone whose lives they touch, especially the prostitutes and any other women who are willing to have sex with them.
This is perhaps the most amusing thing about your stance. You bristle at the notion of paying a woman for dinner in hopes that maybe she'll have sex, but have no problem whatsoever with paying the wages of a sex worker that she will use to buy herself dinner.
This is quite consistent. If someone has no problem whatsoever with paying a sex worker, why would they think it's also a good idea to pay a woman for dinner in hopes that maybe she'll have sex? The "maybe a paid-for dinner leads to sex" strategy is simply an alternative way of paying for sex, and the biggest difference is that it doesn't work, while the sex worker does. The second biggest difference is that the sex worker is explicitly affirming the existence of the deal, and agreeing to it, while the non-prostitute date would reject the deal if it were explicitly put into words, and she probably doesn't believe that there's an implicit social contract, or a binding moral duty, to follow the terms of the deal "If the man pays for the woman's meal, the woman should have sex with him." (Or, if she does believe this in some sense, it's far from obvious.) With these two disadvantages, how could it still be a good idea to use paying for dinner as the way of getting sex? Just go to dinner, and pay an amount that is "enough, but not too much," and see if your date wants to have sex, and if she doesn't, then since you didn't spend too much, you've still got enough left over for a prostitute. Maybe you had to refuse to pay for your date in order to make sure you had enough for the prostitute, or maybe your budget had enough in it for both expenditures. Either way, everybody wins. The man gets a good time with a woman he likes and sex with either the same woman he likes or a different woman he likes. The date gets a good time, with sex if she wants it and no pressure to have sex if she doesn't, and the possibility of a free meal probably isn't that important to her anyway (but it is less likely, on average, that the date will get an outcome where she wants a free meal, gets a free meal, doesn't want sex, and doesn't have sex). And the prostitute gets paid if the date won't do what she will.
See, I've just designed a great system that has no use for a strong expectation that the man should pay for dinner. And if a man is satisfied with that system, of course he should consider the sex worker to be a valuable part of the system, while it would be a cheating subversion if the date started to try to get the man to pay every time, with the incentive that if he fails to pay, the chances that she'll put out will drop from 50% to nothing. Indeed, that form of subverting the status quo wouldn't work, and one of the reasons the sex worker is valuable is precisely that she is a big help in preventing it from working.
So why does anyone pay a woman for dinner in hopes of sex, when they could pay a sex worker? It's because they do have problems with paying a sex worker: Maybe it just feels uncomfortable to make the deal explicitly, maybe they believe that prostitution is basically harmful or unfair to prostitutes, maybe they're stopped by the illegality or the social stigma, maybe they fear diseases, crime, or other risks; but if they believed any of this, their stance isn't that they "have no problem whatsoever" with prostitution.
Or maybe when men pay for their date's meal in hopes that she'll have sex, it's because they want sex with a particular woman who is not a prostitute. Here, however, we still return to the fact that it probably isn't effective, and if someone knows it's not effective, they would be most irrational to try it anyway.
