Website fails taste test

A magazine editor and an advocate have tripped over that fine line between satire and vulgarity.

Jaco Kirsten and Emmanuel Spamer's website, www.meneer.tv, "an Afrikaans internet humour magazine", caused such fury on social media at the weekend that they decided to suspend it.

Kirsten, the editor of Drive Out magazine, and Spamer, an advocate at the Cape Bar, started the site in February and claimed it had chalked up 436000 page views.

The offending content included a piece titled " 14 redes waarom Afrikaanse chicks lekker raps (14 reasons why Afrikaans chicks bonk well)" in which one of the reasons was "Handy: If she grew up on a farm, she knows how to milk a cow. So you're in for the best hand job of your life".

Another article gave reasons why Oscar Pistorius fired at the bathroom door: "It was all a tragic, unfaithful, philandering, blonde bitch - sorry I meant accident".

IT specialist and social activist Johan Pienaar said when he had expressed his unease about the website on Facebook he had received a lawyer's letter telling him to desist. But after journalist Mandy de Waal exposed some of the articles on Twitter at the weekend, Kirsten and Spamer said they had reassessed their content and agreed it was unacceptable.

"Although we believe that humour and satire must by definition explore the boundaries of what is concerned to be good taste, and although we certainly never intended to cause any offence, we now accept that certain lines should never be crossed, even in the name of comedy."