I have a friend who used to advertise on backpage. She just did handjobs, not full-service... She was sort-of traumatized by the experience, but learned a lot at the same time.

One of my early taxi passengers was certainly a "working girl" [1]. I picked her up at a hotel early in the morning. I called the provided number, asked the hotel operator to give me the room number, and told the man who answered that I was at the lobby. When the passenger came out it was not a dude. She didn't seem like she enjoyed herself very much.

[1] https://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-girl.html

Over my 3.5 years in the cab, I had several female passengers who helped me understand more about female attraction. One got in the cab and was speaking German into her phone, so I asked "Sprechen sie deutsch?" My German is not that good, but she insisted in conducting the taxi ride in German. She clearly found me to be intriguing, wondered "what are you doing driving a cab?", and gave me a kiss at the end of the ride. I never heard from her again.

Another woman going home from the bar would've been interested in a date and said, "you have my number." Things were complicated at the time, so I never called her back.

I told another female passenger about my relationship drama. She concluded that ride saying, "well I was about to ask you to make out...", and commented on how I had a sort of magnetism about me that she found most men lacked.

Men frequently have no idea what makes them annoying to women. Even though I'm not taxi driving anymore, I still practice my people skills. The female staff at my fitness club are interesting: some have decided that I'm "safe", while others have their shields up and clearly aren't interested in talking to me about anything that's not work related.

A month ago I ended a comment here with this line: "Relationship coaching for men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503

IMHO, our dear leaders would be more productive if they looked at the causes behind the sex industries (prostitution/porn/backpage advertisements/etc). I'd suggest they start with my post, "The Difference Between Boys and Girls" [2]. I tell this story to women all the time (when contextually-appropriate), and they all laugh.

[2] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-... (tl/dr: female passenger didn't understand her new guy-friend's problem with her relationship history. I told her about how women choose who they want to have relationships with, whereas men have to play the numbers game until they find someone who's interested in them, and how some men never get 'picked'.)

Sex work is easy money, for women who are wired that way. Like the friend I mentioned at the top of this post, only a few women can do it as a calling; most just find themselves in that line of work because they need money.

Another passenger was a stripper that I saw a couple times (randomly assigned by the taxi company's computer system; she never called me directly). The last time she told of being followed home from her strip club, that she'd been beaten up, and that she didn't feel safe at her gated apartment complex anymore...

If our dear leaders acknowledged that this "oldest profession" exists for a reason, progress could be made in making 'sex work' safer for women. (I don't have any insights into the male stripper/sex worker's world, certainly they have predicaments too...)