Hello all, I’ll try to keep this relatively short. My friend and I, who I’ll refer to as Charlie (not his real name), were getting into a heated debate over prostitution on the way to go see a movie about a week ago. For context, we were talking about women in terms of online dating, and by one way or another prostitution was brought into the conversation. Essentially, Charlie’s stance on it was that women who do sex work are, and I quote, “all whores and sluts who love getting fucked because they don’t have any self-respect.”

This take really quite shocked me, as he is a mellow guy who usually has a very understanding and worldly approach to polarizing topics such as prostitution, so it just caught me off guard. I responded by telling him as best I could that sex workers often find themselves in really shitty financial situations, and that while I acknowledged that I couldn’t speak for everyone who does sex work, I imagine most don’t do it out of want but need.

In this specific context, I was referring to Asian countries such as Thailand, where prostitution is common place, and where there is a very high poverty rate. I told him that many women in Thailand do sex work to support their impoverished families, and that both sex and prostitution as ideas are viewed very differently in their society than in the United States, where Charlie and I are from. Charlie started becoming very defensive, and began telling me that “all of those women are just too lazy to find any alternatives, and since something like sex is highly desired, they just take pleasure in the act with the added benefit of getting paid afterwards.”

At this point in the conversation, I was getting upset by his overly hateful, and what I thought to be ignorant tone of sex workers. I’m not sure why, I don’t know anyone who does that kind of work and I’m a man so I know that I’ll never be able to relate in a way that women can, but his take just angered me all the same. It just felt wrong, and targeted, like he was singling out a group of people for fabricated surface level reasons without being willing to think about said reasons on a much deeper level, and so I called his views hateful and ignorant.

I told him to his face that the mindset of seeing complicated issues and speaking on them in a hateful way without thinking about them on a deeper level is an ignorant and self-destructive approach to both the aforementioned complicated issues and the world alike. When we arrived at the cinema, we both just dropped the conversation and went inside.

A day later, Charlie texts me telling me that what I said to him was out of line and that he didn’t appreciate me calling him ignorant, and that he took it as an insult to his intelligence. I explained to him that my intention wasn’t to insult him but to understand him, and that I did in fact see his views as ignorant because as a personal standard I try to understand something before speaking on it, and that you can’t really give a valid opinion on something if you don’t know what it is you’re talking about.

Then, Charlie then tells me that the reason he said what he said was because he respected women, and that he hated the idea of prostitution from a moral standpoint as a Christian. (As a side-note, Charlie is quite religious, whereas I am not.) This response didn’t really make sense to me at all, as I felt that any decent human being who respected women would not instantly jump to the conclusion that all sex workers are “sluts and nymphomaniacs,” but I held my retort. I told him that I understood and apologized for coming off the way I did, whereas he didn’t apologize for anything, feeling like he was the one owed something.

That whole situation just left a bad taste in my mouth, and it sort of felt like I just ended the conflict out of convenience as I didn’t want to face the reality that he might just be unable to have serious conversations involving thinking on a deeper level. I’m not saying he’s stupid, but sometimes I just feel like I’m coddling a baby with a temper for things it doesn’t like, and is unable to think about or understand why it doesn’t like said things.

Am I in the wrong here? AITA for calling Charlie ignorant or was what I said justified? And, AITA for feeling how I feel about both the topic and about Charlie?