L.A.J. WEEKLY

For those of you out there who know me, it is very hard to offend me, and damn near impossible to gross me out. Well, both happened last week when I visited www.stileproject.com (http://www.stileproject.com), where there was a video posted of a kitten being killed and eaten.L.A.J. WEEKLY

For those of you out there who know me, it is very hard to offend me, and damn near impossible to gross me out. Well, both happened last week when I visited www.stileproject.com (http://www.stileproject.com), where there was a video posted of a kitten being killed and eaten. My gut instinct was anger and depression (being that I like cats better than people sometimes) and I wanted to know who was responsible for the making of that video. My anger was not directed towards the webmaster of Stile Project, whose only role was posting the video (a warning did come with it from him as well) but rather the people behind the making of the video itself. At any rate, I decided to do to my knowledge what no one in the mainstream was able to do – get an interview straight from the man behind Stile Project himself, Jonathan Biderman, AKA Stile, since most people who run sites like his tend to lay low. (Incidentally before I go on here – the video was taken directly from a documentary. More on that later.)

Winner of a prestigious mainstream Internet award last year – The “Webby” and a People’s Choice award for the “weird” category, Stile, 23, started StileProject.com several years ago as a personal homepage and has built it up to what it is today – a popular entertainment site updated daily with extreme content, outrageous commentary, bizarre imagery and a plethora of downloads submitted to him from anonymous people the world over. The site is viewable for free for all surfers (some of the content comes with a warning, some doesn’t) but the bottom line is, huge amounts of traffic obviously goes to his site to either be shocked, delighted, nauseated, annoyed or some other major reaction by choice. After the kitty video surfaced, PETA and others publicly condemned Stile Project. (Wired News broke the story (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46315,00.html ).)
Now, I will be the first to admit that I regularly check subversive sites like www.stileproject.com, consumptionjunction.com (http://www.consumptionjunction.com) and bangedup.com (http://www.bangedup.com) simply because I am a fan of the truly bizarre to say the least. Unfortunately, often times other people visit these sites, and make a big stink about something that offended them, when obviously nobody made them to go there in the first place. “I get a couple of death threats a month. The more I get, the more I know I’m doing something right” Stile admits. The same is true for Paul Dinin, 21, of the also very popular ConsumptionJunction.com (up to 300,000 unique visitors a day and similar in genre but not format to StileProject.com) in that they are in no short supply of hate mail. “We’ve been accosted by everyone from college students to middle-aged, Midwest mothers for being ‘tasteless and repugnant’ and showing a ‘lack of human dignity’,” he states. “The irony is that the hate mail we receive is usually from people who’ve been regularly enjoying our brand of offensive humor for months, and it’s only after we finally post something they PERSONALLY take offense towards that they decide we are the Antichrist of the Internet.”

It’s almost like that freeway accident theory in my opinion as to why so many people go to these kinds of sites that complain the most. Do people have a need to upset themselves? I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone with a morbid curiosity that hasn’t forced themselves one time or another to look at something objectionable, whether it be a freeway accident, a news clip, a movie, or something on the Internet. Obviously the success of any form of entertainment website is that a large portion of the traffic are repeat visitors every day, and the average viewer’s attention is held for several minutes or longer with each visit. Dinin adds, “The Internet allows sites like ours to bypass the typical regulatory and corporate filters that distort the original vision of most big-media entertainment programming, and empowers the audience to choose from a huge selection of what they enjoy viewing. What makes Stile Project and Consumption Junction so special is that we’ve both grown tremendous audiences without the expensive smoke and mirrors of advertising. Consumption Junction was ranked in the top 150 entertainment sites on the Internet by Jupiter Media-Metrix for a good reason – we know how to hold people’s attention.”

Getting back to why PETA is allegedly making claims to take legal action against Stile Project, Stile states, “I think PETA is just trying to stir up controversy and bring attention to their cause. I have no problems with that, but I think their rage is misdirected, since the video clip is from a documentary on a culture, which thinks nothing of eating cats. The exact same things and worse have been broadcast on CNBC this week, not to mention a video of a cat being skinned alive and dropped into boiling water on HBO and PBS. They are acting as if I made a video of the torture of an animal for entertainment. It couldn’t be anything further from that. The same way our culture thinks nothing of eating pigs, cows, chickens and lambs some cultures think of dogs and cats. They are extremely hypocritical since they themselves have the same type of videos on their sites.”

So I decided to seek some of these videos out, and I have to say, that some of the ones that I accessed through peta.com (http://www.peta.com/) and goveg.com (http://www.goveg.com) (two of the many sites out there that are for the ethical treatment of animals, and aim to raise awareness and often times make vegetarians out of people) were horrible to look at. In fact, the kind of torture that cows, pigs and chickens go through at the slaughterhouse goes way beyond the pain and suffering endured by the kitten in the video mentioned earlier, in my opinion. After viewing the videos of how meat is processed and what animals have to go through almost makes me want to go vegetarian again… almost (I tried it once before for a year, and lost too much weight.) So in all honesty, I am not bitching at all about the anti-meat videos, and in reality, meat eaters of any kind should be the last to have a problem with any of them. Killing an animal domestic or wild for food and survival regardless of culture is one thing… committing animal cruelty or the making of a “crush video” (sick torture to small animals being crushed to death by a woman in high heels mostly to appeal to foot fetishists) is another. But that is a completely different topic, and one that no smart webmaster would touch.

At any rate, even though I have been a supporter of PETA and other such animal rights groups before, they are being hypocritical for causing a ruckus over the kitty video. If there were any way to prove something to be gratuitous violence against an animal of any kind like a crush video or something, then I would be totally in support of seeing to it that some form of justice is enforced against the offender. But such is not the case here, and regardless of intent, many of these animal rights groups run the same kind of what could be considered disturbing videos on their own sites as seen on Stile Project and Consumption Junction, so all negative publicity generated out of this is simply someone feeling their First Amendment rights are more important than someone else’s in my opinion.

For more commentary on the kitty video, and the backlash as a result of it, please visit (http://www.stileproject.com/kitty.html) and (http://www.stileproject.com/wired.html). But I will warn you… if you don’t want to be offended, don’t look.

As of press time, due to death threats and invasive media inquires Stileproject.com was sold (to some guy named Cliff). There is now a warning page to enter the site (there wasn’t before), and it appears that the content and appearance of the site is totally different now.