He thought he was being edgy and cool by seeing sex workers.
I think that’s precisely it. If you read his book he leans heavily into this narrative that all these women wanted him so badly but he had declined because he was a JW. For example there was a classmate in art school he got locked into a closet with during a party and he meticulously described her vibe as one which was expecting Lloyd to ravish her right there. There was Tracey who had ink all over her hands and asked him to adjust her bra strap which he declined to do. There was this American student who was ready to come to his dad’s house for sex whilst his dad was away but at the last minute he turned her down.
So he was ashamed of his “virgin MTS grad” status and the only immediate way out was to marry the first JW woman who would have him. Being a pioneer sister from a poorer country, he thought he could dominate her and make her dependent upon him, which is something which continues even to this day.
Like a lot of adolescents, he was obsessed with “numbers”, i.e. number of women he had slept with. He resented the fact that he could count his sexual conquests on one finger and began to take out his frustration on his wife by asking her to do things a JW considered perverted.
He became an exJW celebrity in the middle of the last decade. Crowds as large as 50 to 75 people were all waiting to meet him and all he needed to do was tweet out that he was coming to a certain area. It all went to his head. He saw a few adoring faces in the crowd, many of them female, and felt how wonderful it would feel to seduce a few.
So he started cultivating an image of an exJW “degenerate” or rebel. He’s open about his penchant for hard alcohol and cigars, and more recently his extensive use of cannabis. By the time he had revealed the extent of his dalliances with sex workers to Kim and Bob, he thought it made him look cool. There he was in Thailand, higher than fuck on edibles and throwing money at prostitutes.
His ultimate goal was to drive his wife’s self esteem so low as to accept an open marriage as the only way to keep him happy as a husband. He’d have ongoing dalliances with women he met on his activist trips like he was a playboy prince.
Now he’s singing karaoke at a Zagreb expat bar. And he absolutely hates what he’s been reduced to.