It recently dawned on me that Hugh Hefner is basically the same character as Jeffrey Epstein or Keith Raniere (the guy who ran the nexium sex slave cult). There are many TV shows and documentaries that praise Hefner, so if you happened to see one of those as a child, and didn't hear anyone say anything contrary, you'd grow up to think he's a laudable, decent guy instead of a weirdo scumbag that preyed on women.
The vice trades were illegal or heavily regulated for many years of US history. They're pernicious and have built-in positive feedback mechanisms. As they go mainstream, their negative consequences feed their future growth.
The puritanism of the United States was pretty stale and dogmatic by the post WW2 era, though. Religious dogma is not enough to forestall infiltration by an underworld of vice peddlers. Once a religion is reduced to a pile of laws, it's easy to pick apart and destroy, and the churches and soccer mom types of any era help to discredit merely legalistic morality.
Another pernicious aspect of the vice trades is they work like a ratchet. As the society gets more debauched, nobody is left to lead people out of the slime. Everyone watches porn, so anyone who would speak out against it looks like a hypocrite. Unfortunately, the average person is too dumb to hear any nuanced argument like, "I watched porn, but I think it's bad now, so I don't".
Countries that have harsh laws against vice aren't necessarily good, either. Saudi Arabia, for example, has extremely harsh vice laws, but is ruled by a totally debauched group of twisted freaks. In fact, the such laws, like Prohibition in the USA, help the vice industry. They're generally like a license to operate in a given jurisdiction as organized crime.
The distributed Internet consensus machine could work as an antidote to the vice industry more effectively than blue laws or churches.
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