In a surprising move, BDSM porn company Kink.com has suddenly stopped production on two of its most “extreme” sub-sites. CEO Peter Acworth tells Salon the company is halting filming on the wildly popular Public Disgrace and Bound in Public. Both series were shot with a public, and often participatory, audience — and as such, generated attention and criticism. (You can read about my experience witnessing a Public Disgrace shoot here.) The company is also rebranding HardCoreGangBangs as FantasyGangBangs, while putting a stronger emphasis throughout the series on consent.

At the same time, Kink is ramping up its educational efforts, in the form of video demonstrations of and sexuality workshops on everything from fellatio to dirty talk to rope restraint. Increasingly, Kink will be welcoming the public into The Armory, the company’s historic castle-like building in San Francisco, for events kinky and otherwise. Their massive drill court? Acworth is hoping the NSFW venue will become host to SFW conferences.

It’s hard to know what this story is really about. The proliferation of free online porn? (After all, with porn profits plummeting, alternative revenue streams are a smart move.) The success of activists in putting pressure on pornographers? Censorship through political pressure? The coming-of-age of a popular porn company? The mainstreaming of BDSM? Whatever it is, it certainly seems reflective of the time we’re living in.

This decision comes after a spot of bad press. Last summer, former porn performer Cameron Bay tested positive for HIV after filming a Public Disgrace shoot. The transmission did not happen on set, but the incident amounted to a lot of negative P.R. for Kink and the porn industry as a whole — especially after Bay reported that her costar got a cut on his penis during filming but the shoot continued. Acworth says the decision to bring the series, along with Bound in Public, to a halt isn’t driven by that, alone, though. Instead, he says it’s an attempt to be more inclusive, and to better fulfill the company’s aim of “demystifying alternative sexualities.” It’s also part of a new push to turn Kink.com into a lifestyle brand à la Playboy.

I spoke with Acworth by phone about the future of the porn industry, condom activism and turning Kink’s naughty logo into the contemporary equivalent of the Playboy bunny.

Tell me about this recent decision to shut down two of your sites.

We’ve essentially stopped shoots on both sites that would have a public audience. That is to say, Bound in Public and Public Disgrace, and we are changing Hardcore Gangbangs to be much more explicitly the fantasy of the female participant. It’s a rebrand. Behind the scenes, these larger scenes with lots of people were quite frankly controlled, but nevertheless they look like they’re not controlled. We’ve been attacked in that manner in the past. It’s difficult to defend, as much as if you would actually speak to the people who were there, or speak to the crew, we could explain how the situation is controlled, but the outside view may be a little more difficult at first view. The mission of the company is to demystify alternative sexuality. Most people are just figuring out what their sexuality is, so we want to open the door to them. If the first thing they see is super-extreme, it doesn’t fulfill our mission as well.

What kind of criticism were you facing, was it mostly in the condom debate?

Certainly. We know that the people concerned didn’t actually contract HIV on set, nevertheless, the last shoot that the individuals last summer were in happened to be at Kink. We suffered a great deal of negative P.R. over that whole issue, and the fact that Kink.com was one of the companies that signed up to fight that new legislation. It made us a scapegoat for a lot of negative publicity.

I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the primary driver behind this. In general, we’re wanting to become a lifestyle brand and that’s been the vision for some time, even before these things last summer. We’re in the process of rebuilding our backend infrastructure and the engine that powers the sites and it’s entirely possible to sell products — for instance, you can click on a movie and see what items we used on a movie and put them in the shopping cart and check out. We’re wanting our logo to be sort of more of a lifestyle brand than just known for the movies we make.