"Experts argue that the female sex workers are not the real drivers of prostitution. Instead the business survives because of demand from the legions of males who have problems in their relationships with women:

Sociologist Julia O'Connell Davidson of the University of Nottingham in England characterizes johns as necrophiliacs who commit their acts on socially “dead” women. These are men, she says, whose sexual desire is switched on by not having to care about the prostitute as a human being—the opposite of the intimacy hypothesis.

“What turns the john on is the woman's powerlessness,” O'Connell Davidson concludes. Sex with a prostitute, she says, is more about seeking revenge on women or exerting control over them than about a quest for intimacy and romance.

For many of them, professor Sven-Axel Månsson of Malmö University in Sweden opines, a prostitute's bed represents the last bastion of antifeminism. Only there can men reestablish the traditional male dominance over women."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-men-buy-sex-2012-10-23/