I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the (verbed) word "commoditized".
Hookers and brothels have always always been around as boutique businesses. The libertine ethos brought in by the sexual revolution is more akin to a Circle K on every corner.
There have always been sluts and whores and nasty porn, but they were minor exceptions kept on the down low. Playboy was something new. Celebrities aside, the girls in Playboy centerfolds were girls next door. It normalized porn and made jerking off respectable. It joined an unholy alliance with the libertine Left to remove the stigma from slutty (read:irresponsible and self-destructive) behavior while branding anybody who wishes more for their sons and daughters than to be rutting pigs as religious prudes. ("Don't want your daughter spreading her legs for the football team or your son to contract V.D.? You are a sex-hating prude!!!)
So . . . can anybody say with a straight face our society is healthier now than in 1950 because we are comfortable with free sex? Really? Now that the rallying cry of the American male is, "Milk is free, you stupid cows, hahahahaha!"
Before Playboy, men’s garages and tool sheds had calendars with pinup art and even photography. Copies of Esquire and other similar men’s magazines too.
It was quite a business, all kinds of businesses and organizations were pumping them out.
Nancy Pelosi herself was ‘Miss Lube Rack’.
Hefner and the bible thumpers would like to believe that he brought down Western Civilization and kept America from being able to win land wars in Asia.
All he actually did was put out a version of ‘Esquire’ with a better name and pictures in it instead of art. He even printed articles they turned down.
And for some crazy reason ‘Esquire’ stopped putting pinups in their magazine around that time, their circulation plummeted.