The first Playboy magazine came out in December, 1953, to which, back then, the social mores of this nation were significantly different than they are today, and truly that is a monumental understatement. In 1953, pictures of young ladies in magazines that were topless, were not socially acceptable, in addition to the basic fact, that the amount of attractive young females even willing to have pictures taken of them, in which they were topless, was an incredibly low percentage, so that in the time of Playboy's inception, the pool of women that were willing to be photographed was very limited. Yet, Hugh Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy, was able to over a period of time, prove that there was a market for a magazine like Playboy to exist, and that rather than be known for "dirty" pictures, would be able to present itself as a sophisticated fantasyland of pretty woman, along with providing good literature, meaningful commentary of current events, and so forth to create a magazine persona that had not existed in the open before.
Nowadays, with pornography so prevalent and seemingly every possible angle of human sexuality available at the touch of a finger, Playboy looks as if it is out of style, out of touch, and irrelevant, but to get there was a process that involved a fundamental change in the viewpoint of provocative pictures, laws in regards to the publication and displaying of such being challenged and overturned often through the clever usage of 1st Amendment rights, and the liberation of women to decide what they did or did not wish to do with their own bodies, freed from the constraints of both men, but also of the laws that precluded their monetizing their images without suffering unfairly for it.
The upshot of all this change, was that magazines such as Playboy, went from a situation in which previously they had struggled just to find pretty females to pose for them, all for what would be considered today to be relatively tame topless poses, into a world transformed into the anything goes philosophy that is displayed graphically in living color, each and every minute, in just about any format that is available for viewing such in today's society. This change was so fundamental, that young ladies wishing to pose for Playboy in the present day barely registers much of a reaction from most Americans, can almost be seen as mainstream, especially when seen against the background of everything else that is going on.
Whether all of the above is a net good for America, or is a net good for woman in general, or is a net good for those perusing such things, is definitely debatable, but the bottom line is the genie has jumped from out of the bottle and thereby isn't going to be put back inside anytime soon. This is the brave new world that we live in, where people are no longer constrained for the most part by social mores or legal laws, which preclude them from doing or pursuing the things that they wish to accomplish. However, with more freedom, comes more responsibility, so that, when no longer restrained from doing things that they want or think that they want to do, decisions are made, which, because of the nature of the medium, last far longer, than envisioned at the time of their consent, for better or for worse, it is what it is.