I imagine some Dopers have experience with this.
Paying for sex. Is it fun and worth it? Or is it gross and disappointing?
Answers from male or female encouraged.
This thread by polar bear is an interesting place to start.
Satisfying for whom? The payer? Or the one being paid?
The payer - at least that’s how I parse the OP.
Sharing personal details of this kind on this board can be hazardous to one’s mental health, but I’ll supply the first substantive answer.
I paid for sex once. It wasn’t bad, not that different from having picked up someone for a one-night stand.
Now that I am old and overweight and can afford it, and if I were single, I might see doing it again, with the right sort of person. Even if the contact is only physical and has no emotional content, I think it might help with the yearning for connection.
There are aspects of it that, under the right circumstances, kind of do push my buttons in a pleasant way.
Picture, if you will, a person plying that particular trade, who gets an enjoyable sense of power from getting a target sufficiently sexually arounsed and interested and enticed that they can’t really remain committed to holding onto their money, and will go along with it.
When money isn’t involved, but one party sets out to obtain sexual pleasure from another person without their initially being so inclined, but getting them there by recruiting the target’s own sexuality to undermine their self-determination, we call it “seduction”. But it has often been said that you can’t seduce the willing. People of my sex are often considered to be always ready and rarely reluctant, and one consequence of that is that there is a scarcity of female people going around seducing reluctant guys.
Putting money into the situation creates the dynamic within which his readiness and willingness isn’t necessarily to be assumed. Not all people in the profession get a kick out of turning a guy’s sexual appetite into a crowbar to separate him from the contents of his wallet, but some do. Not all potential johns are all that uninterested or uninclined from the outset, of course, either.
I have residual concerns about exploitation and life in a marginalized lifestyle and immigrants and other vulnerable people being shuttled into prostitution, even with many professionals testifying that they do what they do by choice and enjoy the profession, to be comfortable playing with the above on purpose, seeking a repeat, but I can’t deny that it was quite entertaining and exciting at the time to be put in that situation.
“If God exists, why is my ass the perfect height for kicking?”
I’m curious what it said before you edited it, G.
I’d suspect that, if it was gross and disappointing, no one would ever go back. That’s obviously not the case.
I dunno. Applebee’s is still in business.
*like
I cannot confirm nor deny that I had a certain casual dining restaurant (one whose name starts with “A” and ends with “bee’s”) as a client for years. However, this made me laugh, too. 
Depending on what urge you are exactly trying to satisfy, the answer to the question in the title can range from “Very” to “not at all”.
What the questions in your post is concerned:
It can be fun and worth it, but that’s not a given (and sort of depends on how much you spend and how much that money means to you).
It is just sex, if you sometimes find sex to be gross… that won’t be different here. I have never seen anything to make this more gross than normal sex (but then again, I don’t go to gang bangs).
Disappointing? Sure, that happens (and again depends on what you’re looking for).
Decades ago, when I was going through a lonely period with low self-image, I paid for sex three times. I don’t think I actually got sex on any of these, but they were interesting experiences nonetheless. They were too expensive for what I got.
I had a weird situation years ago where a woman approached me at a bar and we began chatting. A few drinks later and she mentioned she was starving. I was hungry too, and asked if she wanted to go somewhere for dinner. She suggested a place and off we went.
After I paid the dinner check, I was ready to head home. I’d had an ok time, but I did not “feel a spark” and I thought neither had she. But, she suggested a nightcap at her place, which was close, so we ended up there. She made a first move and we spent some time in the bedroom.
I never saw or heard from her again. The next time I was in the bar where we’d met, a friend mentioned to me that the woman I’d left with that night was a professional, and was banned from the bar because of her occupation. I never figured out if she was taking the night off and we just ended up together, or if she felt she was thanking me for dinner, or something else.
I’m curious about something. Sometimes sex is gross, but when you are with someone for a long time you can laugh it off. I’d think it would be worse with a professional. Ditto for performance anxiety. After all you are paying.
I’d guess that someone golfing with a pro is going to worry about his golf fundamentals more than someone golfing with some buddies.
I did visit some pretty “satisfying” lap dance places, and that was quite fun. The one time I have in Nevada in a legal place, it wasnt very fun.
I would think it would be just the opposite. You don’t have to try to impress the pro or make sure she orgasms or anything like that. I would imagine it makes it easier.
Like with any other experience, it’s going to depend on the person. I’ve done it once. I was in my early-20s, living in Budapest, was a bit bored, had a little too much to drink, my roommate was off in Albania so I was home by myself, and figured, “oh, what the hell…when in Rome…”
I learned that it wasn’t for me. It was a very cold and awkward experience, and I didn’t finish or anything. She kept asking me either if I was on drugs or if I had drugs (I didn’t know enough Hungarian at the time to figure it out–I wasn’t on drugs, nor did I have any.) At any rate, the experience didn’t work with my personality and attitudes towards sex, and I found that out. Meanwhile, I had some friends who regularly partook and seemed to enjoy it (and they were types that could pick up girls at the bar if they wanted to, but they seemed to enjoy the straightforward, no-strings-attached nature of it, I guess. Or perhaps doing something slightly illicit satisfied a kink.)
I think that’s as much of an answer as you can get: some find it satisfying; some don’t, and sometimes it varies on other factors within an individual.