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I've been on stage when there's been an inappropriate response from an audience. In one case it turned out that a phrase I used had a specific and completely unexpected meaning in that geographical area. I looked it up later, and I'm not surprised it got the response it did.

But having got that at an unexpected moment, when you're on stage in front of a large audience, working out the exact correct response can be difficult. Really difficult. To the point where you need not to respond immediately, and give it time.

I'm spoken with the author, and he's used this exact presentation in the past with a variety of audiences and had no inappropriate responses before this one. There was no a priori reason to believe this occasion would be different, and I think his response was perfectly reasonable.

You, speaking in hindsight, will have a different point of view. For me, as a speaker with over 150 engagements every year, having given presentations to various audiences for the last 25 years, I think your assessment is misguided.

Yes, there are serious issues here that need to be addressed, and no doubt there will be many self-appointed experts about what should and shouldn't be done, shown, and said. Personally, when something like this happens I think it's brave for a speaker to put in the public domain the choices made in the moment, in front of an audience, with no time to choose your words.

He trotted out sexualized imagery, and objected when a subgroup of adolescent boys connected Nigella and Bond girls to sex instead of his intended SCIENCE. There is science in food, but Nigella is not in the science camp of the food media world.

In hindsight, his error should be obvious even to him. He addressed that point not at all, instead focusing on the offensiveness of adolescent boys.

I can appreciate that perhaps he wasn't prepared for this audience, and I certainly agree that an unexpected response requires the speaker to improvise. He improvised poorly, as many of us would, even experienced speakers. That's not my objection.

My objection is that he doesn't own up to his part in the construction. If he was presenting it any less triumphantly, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.

He taunted, and tried to shame, a rabble of 15-year old boys. That never ends well, and even if you pull off the most honorable response possible, your victory is hollow.

He should realize that, at least.

Much of what you're saying was said by someone on Twitter, and the original author has responded to that:

Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6835021

Probably not worth a submission of its own, but the Twitter-er said it all far better than I:

http://therationaliser.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-peacock-pr...

And the original speaker comes off defensive and simultaneously pleased with himself in his response:

http://www.jamiebgall.co.uk/the-peacock-problem-response/458...

If he can't see that adolescent boys will generally not be on their best behaviour, and will almost always take rebuke from a stranger on a stage -- that they don't even want to be in the audience of -- as a challenge to be met with volume...well he doesn't get it.

Ironically, perhaps, he's running the same game as the adolescents in his defense of his actions. I didn't do it, you misunderstood, it wasn't that bad, so what anyway, eff off if you disagree, I'm a great speaker so you're obviously wrong, etc.

(Also, did he mean Qatar the country with stellar womens' rights, where he was invited to give the speech again, after his performance?)

When I think Nigella (or Giada) I think "sexy woman who cooks on TV". I suspect most people do too.

If he had wanted to suggest "food and SCIENCE", there would be fewer people better suited to this suggestion than Alton Brown, at least in the US. I don't know if he's popular in the UK, but his Good Eats show presented a great mashup of popular science and cooking.

There's a lot of attention around the objectification of women. Objectification is a problem. What people fail to appreciate is that objectification of men happens also but it isn't as overt as a wolf-whistle.

Women are objectified sexually. Men are objectified by status. A sexually attractive woman always has to ask herself "does he like me because of my looks?" A man with status often asks himself the parallel question "if I was poor or a nobody would she be with me?"

It doesn't happen with a wolf-whistle, but it is just as insidious.

> it is just as insidious.

As a woman I completely agree with this - which is why it's hard to see issues like this on HN. The argument suddenly turns to "but men have it hard too!" instead of "wow, we're messed up, let's all acknowledge this together".

Yes, acknowledging is good. I wonder whether we'll ever be able to "fix" it.

Objectification is a cognitive function. We all do it to some degree. When our attention turns to a person, it isn't always at their core. For instance an employer might see her employees in a utilitarian way at one moment and appreciate their humanity and feelings the next. The big issue is whether it's hurtful or the dominant mode in a person.

I was wondering the same thing wrt the Bond girl. Perhaps he wanted to create a "teachable moment"? If so, and the result was as positive as he claims, then I'm fine with it.

Edit: Also, you say it isn't so black and white but the point of it is not that somewhere, some boys were bad (SHOCKING), but that he got a good reception to his response.

Don't kid yourself. There are no "teachable moments" in all-boy high schools. Just varying degrees of perceived ridiculousness as performed by adults.

I feel certain that the situation was manufactured, possibly even intentionally, but if it was manufactured "for the good of the children", I would assert that this guy doesn't know anything about much.

From ColinWright's comment [1] upthread, it doesn't seem like it was manufactured. But even if it was, the point of the article did not seem to be that, look, horrors, boys were acting out. That's utterly unremarkable. It was that they (or the audience as a whole) responded well to his lecture at the end. He seems to think this is a new phenomenon.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833804

The Bond girl ideal is uncomfortable for women because they are only objects: they exist for a single purpose, to be gazed at. Maybe they have a cheeky few words but they are one-dimensional. Real sexuality is 2-way: both people are involved. For a really good look at how frustrating this is for women see Helen Mirren's famous interview with Michael Parkinson, where he tells her she is "projecting sluttish eroticism".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmlP_cFOoAM

Sex sells, and that works both ways.

It's hard for me to come up with a better analogy, because I don't watch the traditional female equivalent of a Bond movie, whatever that may be. However, I sure know that Thor's bathing scene, with his perfectly tanned, flexing muscles glistening in the candlelight in the newest movie sure as hell wasn't for my benefit. And from the annoying hoots from the group of girls behind me, I can surmise they felt their price of admission justified.

Again, I know it's not a great analogy. Thor, while not being the most interesting character by far, is surely not just on screen as simply a flexing bicep. That said, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast didn't transform into a scrawny ugly man, either.

Fortunately for Thor, being a man, has more to do on screen than just be there for the female gaze.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test

Perhaps you missed it, but I acknowledged the fact that Thor was not just there for female gaze.

And for what it's worth, Thor passes the Bechdel test, if only barely.

Edit: on re-read.. This presentation was given at an all-boys adolescent school. So, OK, the condescension comes from a place of teacherdom. And I guess the pop sex icon imagery thrown in was to relate to the audience.

A pox on all that.

This guy didn't even save the kids from the metaphorical fire. He lit a match in a dry field and wrote a blog post about how he railed earnestly against the coming of the conflagration.

Rather reads like a hero fantasy, doesn't it?

  > This presentation was given at
  > an all-boys adolescent school.

No, it wasn't. It was a mixed audience at a large, central (non-school) location. Schools had brought students to the event, and some of those schools were single-sex schools.

Can you point at the part of the submission where you deduced the presentation was at a single-sex school? It needs editing if it's giving that impression, and I'll pass your comments on.

> the appearance of Nigella had an interesting and unexpected effect: a rowdy all-boys school started wolf whistling.

You're right, I misinterpreted that quote to mean that the audience was an all-boys school. My apologies.

My criticism stands, though. Poorly-considered reactions all around, including the folks who applauded the speaker's indignance -- for rushing blindly into the arms of the less offensive.