John MacDonald: Are we too quick to be offended on behalf of other people?

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

If you started the week not knowing the name Simon Henry, you probably know it now.
He’s the rich-lister who is the founder and chief executive of chemicals company DGL Group who is under fire - quite rightfully, might I add - for saying some appalling things about Nadia Lim, whose name I’m guessing you did know at the start of the week. Masterchef winner and judge, co-founder of My Food Bag, creator of the lockdown TV cooking show, organic farmer - she’s done and is doing a whole lot of things.
And she is somewhat reluctantly in the news today because of what Simon Henry said about her in a media interview - calling her “Eurasian fluff”.
He was talking about My Food Bag not performing well since it listed on the sharemarket with a journalist from the National Business Review. Here’s what he had to say about the company’s sharemarket prospectus document.
"When you've got Nadia Lim, when you've got a little bit of Eurasian fluff in the middle of your prospectus with a blouse unbuttoned showing some cleavage, and that's what it takes to sell your script, then you know you're in trouble."
And he suggested that Nadia Lim uses her "sensuality" to sell her products. He said she was "a TV celebrity showing off her sensuality".
By the way, just for clarification, the only picture of Nadia Lim in the My Food Bag prospectus has her standing around a barbecue in a casual v-necked camisole top with jeans. The top has no buttons.
So he’s talking out of his backside, or his rear cleavage.
I think I said this yesterday, I think (in my honest opinion) that Simon Henry has shown himself to be a complete turkey with these comments.
And I don’t appear to be alone. The response has been pretty swift.
KiwiSaver provider Kiwi Wealth has added Henry’s company, DGL Group, to its investment exclusions list. So Kiwi Wealth has blacklisted it.
Nadia Lim herself has said overnight that she didn’t want to get involved in this whole thing but that changed on Wednesday night when she found herself sitting opposite a young flight attendant on a trip from Christchurch to Queenstown.
Here’s what Nadia Lim said about that overnight on social media: "I smiled at her and she smiled back at me and I actually felt a little bit emotional. She was a young woman of Asian descent, like myself, and I thought 'How do you feel when you hear things like that? Or read things like that?'"
And what she’s commenting on there, in particular, is Simon Henry’s description of her as “a bit of Eurasian fluff”.
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone refer to a woman as a “bit of fluff” since the 1990s. In fact, I’ll tell you the year - it was 1997 and I was in London and this media company guy I was working for was going on about “bits of fluff”.
So these comments from Simon Henry in 2022 feels very old-school to me and, in my opinion, he deserves everything that’s coming to him.
But I know there will be others too who think there’s nothing wrong with what he said. They’ll look at the fact that he’s successful and rich and probably be quite willing to turn a blind eye, because….well, because he’s successful and rich.
Yes, he’s successful (whatever that means). And yes, he is rich. He’s also shown himself through these comments to be an arrogant turkey. There are a lot of arrogant turkeys around, I know. He’s not alone. But most of them limit their sexism and misogyny to drinks with the boys on Friday night. That doesn’t excuse it.
But when someone tells a reporter to quote them, and then goes on to say what Simon Henry said about Nadia Lim - and not just Nadia Lim, about all women of Asian descent - then that takes it to next-level ignorance and arrogance.
Now, even though I’m condemning Henry, it does raise the question whether these types of things get blown out of proportion these days due to the simple fact that, as a society, we are very quick to get outraged on behalf of other...

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