BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Trigger warning and reader guide: This review contains coverage of discussion about discrimination and violence against women, and child abuse in the Catholic church. Please scroll past events in this review that are titled The Fear, Sex and the Soft Right, and Priests in the Closet if you wish to avoid this content.
After attending a number of music-specific events in last year’s Dark Mofo, I decided to branch out into new territories this year.
Of course, as an introvert, new territories are often a challenge to navigate.
Nevertheless, I signed myself up for Dark and Dangerous Thoughts, going it solo in a venue filled with open minds and intellectuals and the curious – each united in the desire to expand their understanding of how our 21st Century world works. At least, that’s why I was there to listen.
On 6 June, I arrived alone at the inner-city Odeon Theatre, and seated myself in the darkest, least-obvious corner of the room. A powerfully delivered Welcome to Country opened the series of discussions and talks, the first of which was a sermon delivered by Yumi Stynes and titled The Fear.
Yumi is the host of ABC Radio podcast Ladies, We Need to Talk, SBS documentary Is Australia Sexist?, and author of The Zero Fucks Cookbook: Best Food Least Effort. She was also on the receiving end of death threats and harassment after calling out Kerri-Anne Kennerly for being racist.
Yumi asked the audience “What are you afraid of?” and proceeded to deliver her speech with all the power of someone entirely unrattled by these recent affairs that plagued her. Yumi defined popular “top-line” fears of spiders and heights. I identified my own top-line fear as: Having to talk to literally anyone else in this room.
But her sermon gradually spun into a social study, of sorts, as she then presented her findings from a collection of public tweets she’d received in response to this very topic. Some had tweeted to Yumi that they were afraid Tony Abbot would make a comeback (LOL); others feared going outside with no pants. Yumi said the most common fear was from people worried about their children dying.
But the fear that was missing? “The fear women have over our own bodies.”
I hadn’t expected the sermon to take this turn, which is evidence of my own inability as a woman to acknowledge this fear, just like all the others in our community. Yumi observed that women “unthinkingly and dutifully wear our fears like deodorant” – we are afraid of being disgusting, afraid of our bodies, afraid of shame – all so that we can export a personal image of sanity and normality.
While this was undoubtedly educational for those in the room who do not personally live the female experience, I too found it confronting as I was challenged to admit to myself that I hold the same fears so deeply, I don’t even realise. I was reminded of Margaret Atwood’s famous quote, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
After a short break, in which I journeyed out to grab a cup of coffee before returning to the now-mildly familiar space, Jeff Sparrow hosted a panel discussion called Sex and the Soft Right (‘What do moderate conservatives and libertarians have to say when it comes to matters of sex, family, and equality?’). It featured Australian founding editor of Quillette Claire Lehmann, and American evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman. They talked about the changing nature and view of family structures, and the troublesome divide between men and women’s domestic labour.
Diana argued that biology or society has encouraged woman to be happy to do more than men in the home. As for me – a woman who refuses to wash dishes, take out the bins, or vacuum (instead opting to leave the domestic dirty work to the much-loved man of the house) – I obviously, and fundamentally, disagree.
Further controversial dialogue between the women covered topics of sex outside marriage (the idea of it being worse for society than the actual sex); the matriarchy of housework (that we gossip about our own cleaning standards and therefore perpetuate our gender role); and an awkward discussion about overemphasising consent (that, in theory, we “minimise the intensity” of a relationship when the woman simply states “yes” or “no”).
Jeff didn’t play too strong a role, here; his interjections were summed up by his impartial but blasé statement that “I’m just playing the devil’s advocate – I don’t actually care”.
What I did find the most dark and dangerous in this discussion was that Claire argued women’s oppression was due to our biology, and that Diana argued women choose their domestic abusers and return to them again and again in relationships. Diana said “one woman a week being murdered” was too “big” compared to other issues, and that women don’t want their abusers to go to jail. These ideas struck me as damaging and almost bordering on victim-blaming; indeed, “dark and dangerous” to the point of being unethical, perhaps.
Luckily, Dark Mofo served its introverts well, and opened the floodgates to audience members to discreetly and anonymously text in questions that’d be answered by the panel live onstage. So, shielding my phone from any potential onlookers, I sent in a text asking if women really do hunt out abusers and return to them again and again, what’s to be said of women entering their first relationships and don’t yet know what abuse looks like? The question was posed; Diana looked stumped, so Claire chimed in that women have a duty to society to make a police report when they experience domestic abuse.
Yeah, that didn’t really do it for me.
After another break (and coffee), Omar Musa performed a poem called UnAustralian, which he described as a “sermon in six parts” – these parts were titled Roadkill, Flags, Fear, Knives, A tourism ad, and Doughnuts.
His sermon was excellent, and he – as unafraid as Yumi – talked and rapped about the way people would send him hatred and racism: “When freedom of speech becomes hate speech […] we cannot be surprised.”
He combined humour with sharp and edgy statements: “Lemme tell ya what’s unAustralian, mate – Australia […] Land of the fair skinned fairy bread fair go.” The audience loved it.
After this came the equally political conversation Is the Past Dead? between Coleman Hughes and chair Claire Lehmann. Coleman, a young student and writer from middle-class New Jersey (mother of Puerto Rican heritage, and father’s history altered by slavery), said: “I think the mistake people make with politics […] is to apply one model” to something multifaceted. He went into great depth about American events, news, politics, and communist-spy history, and that black people are “more socially conservative” than white people despite voting for civil rights in politics.
Coleman challenged white people to think about their own privilege, and encouraged an objective view when searching for the “truth”. I feel this was a relevant discussion for the post-truth and fake news era, and it showed me that I need to build my global socio-political awareness.
The 23-year-old concluded with a positive look into one of the world’s practices of peace: music. “Music is one of the things I do for which I receive no hate.”
After Coleman’s talk, we were treated to lunch at Mona’s newest inner-city venue In the Hanging Garden, and a long-table mingle with some of the Dark and Dangerous Thoughts talents.
(Well, in theory.)
Actually, I decided to bail, so I could scoff down a bowl of lentils on my own, collect my overstimulated thoughts, and spend my remaining 15 minutes browsing my favourite bookshop (at which I bought some soul-redeeming and nostalgia-driven fluff, Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction).
The post-lunch sermon The Stranger (‘What does it take to pass as middle class?’) was on the topic of suburbia. Speaker Shannon Burns complained about his experience of living with his own “Anglo” father after his early childhood with his Greek mother. He described the trauma of getting a mullet as a “tribal marking”; as well as “taking social risks” by being forced to fit in with his own white middle-class community.
In his 20s, Shannon says, he “relished the freedom to pursue German philosophies and French poets” – but was deeply hurt that his fellow uni students took their study for granted and didn’t like literature. “These were not my people, but they were human – or so I told myself.” (Yep, if you are white and don’t like literature, you’re potentially not a human!)
This event presented an important opportunity to discuss identity, but a white man victimising himself as a “cliché of the privileged type” appeared nothing short of self-absorbed.
Moving on, Rosehaven’s Luke McGregor finished the day with a hilarious and hilariously awkward chat with chair Laura Kroetsche, which was titled Average Sex. “You’re our white person,” she laughed when she introduced him to the festival event. He made banter with the audience right from the get-go, and joked about his childhood as a bullying victim (#relatable). On his strategy of using comedy to make the perpetrator laugh, Luke recalled with trademark grin: “He still hit me – but it was much softer”.
He went on to chat about making his ABC series Luke Warm Sex, and the activities behind the scenes (including unwanted erections at nudist parties, and being painfully straddled during some sections of filming). His self-deprecation was charming, but his positive views were down-to-earth and, at the end, he left us with the message of “being comfortable with yourself […] and world peace”.
And that was day one.
I returned later for a second day on 9 June, accompanied by a fellow reviewer and introvert. I would here like to gloat that my second attempt at purchasing reading material was much more impressive. Here’s the evidence, and it includes three books that were the topic of discussion with the authors themselves at Dark and Dangerous Thoughts events:
I’d arrived a couple of minutes late (an irresponsible introvert’s nightmare!) to the above author Ginger Gorman’s sermon Disgusting Trolls. But I was instantly drawn out of my own mind when Ginger was head-first into a seriously serious talk about online hate. Her main call — and reasonably so — was that Facebook and other social platforms need to take more responsibility when it comes to protecting their users. She argued that they have the knowledge, power, and resources to stop online hate, but that they don’t act on it. This may be one of the most important and wide-reaching messages so far.
The next event was Death Spiral, which referred to the death of mainstream media. Claire Lehmann (who we’d seen earlier in the festival) observed a “bubble effect” through which the media covers location-based issues and fails to cover those that are meaningful to everybody — a gap exists between urban and rural audiences. The Chaser personality Julian Morrow argued against this, that there was a “breadth of knowledge due to technology”. The debate conjured a range of views but none particularly supported the thought that media is experiencing a “death spiral” at all.
I was happy to hear Diana Fleischman return for her own sermon titled Rat in a Cage (‘Human ambivalence towards psychological control’), which impressed me far more than her panel discussion. She prefaced it with: “This sermon is not going to be inspiring.” She talked about how we are products of evolution that have become “machines to perpetuate code”; we’re born of selfishness, because that’s what survives. She questioned how we can be the authors of our own selves when we are fundamentally based in survival-of-the-fittest science, and by nature act out to achieve our own gain. Diana gave a grim look into why we resist both control and change as humans. Biting back tears, she concluded with the message that we must harness evolutionary psychology as a tool: “If we are to become angels, we have to know how wings work”.
I wondered if we’d ever be truly changed, as during this sermon I’d glanced at an audience member in front of me browsing Instagram and shopping for fashion products on her mobile phone.
The centrepiece of the day, and perhaps Dark and Dangerous Thoughts more broadly, was a conversation between David Marr and Frédéric Martel called Priests in the Closet. Straight down to business, David asked this author of In the Closet of the Vatican: “Is celibacy the fundamental lie of the Catholic church?” What stemmed from this was an intriguing conversation about repression among Catholic leaders.
Frédéric, who claims through qualitative research that 80 per cent of priests are gay, suggested we add “P” to the list of sexual identities to form “LGBTP — Priest”. He described a culture of secrecy inside the Vatican, in which he’d lived as he conducted research for his book.
Frédéric (who identifies as gay) talked about the way gay men living in the ’40s and ’50s would often join the church to avoid becoming the “shame of the family”; thus, the church itself is a web of lies “that is a story we need to tell”.
The subject matter is undoubtedly and justifiably a source of sensitivity. David argued the church is filled with “sadists”, and that abuse in the church is protected by priests who don’t blow the whistle on sexual abuse because they are afraid of being “outed” as gay themselves; Frédéric empathetically responded that priests too are victims of the closet, and that this form of abuse is a sociological problem.
Despite the topic, David and Frédéric always kept the conversation light, and gave us anecdotes that had the room swell with laughter. Ultimately, Frédéric stated, the “solution is to ordain women, to accept homosexuality, and to allow marriage” if the system is to be saved.
Then, they wound up by ranking the gayness of popes in chronological order.
A lively way to finish a week of dark and dangerous thoughts.
Please visit headspace if you need mental health support.
Images courtesy Dark Mofo.
