When it comes to the things we fear, there is a certain glamour around being afraid of spiders, or flying, or even being a bad person, says Yumi Stynes.
For many women, though, our deepest fears are unspoken.
“We fear being disgusting,” she says. “The fears we have around our bodies are so mundane, so everyday, that we wear them like we wear our daily deodorant: unthinkingly and routinely.”
The talk by the TV presenter and author on Thursday opened the first day of Dark and Dangerous Thoughts (DDT), the ideas festival-within-a-festival that precedes Dark Mofo – Hobart’s midwinter arts bonanza hosted by the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona).
In its first instalment last year, the ideas festival was opened by and contained the distinct flavour and proclivities of Mona’s contrarian and provocative founder, David Walsh. It was fiery and full of conflict, and at times appeared to be careening out of control.
Walsh isn’t taking to the stage this year, although he is a constant presence in the audience – and in the program too, if only implicitly. Curated again by Laura Kroetsch, who moved into the role after her long stint at the Adelaide writers festival, DDT was initially billed as “inspired by” Walsh, and its theme is very on brand: “Has identity politics become the new religion?”
You’d be forgiven for wondering what that even means beyond a dogwhistle to mainstream liberalism. Friday’s schedule includes a debate on the theme with five speakers, including Stynes and a New York Times columnist, Jennifer Boylan, so there may be some answers there.
It’s the only session to explicitly pit speakers of markedly different political stripes against each other; a distinct variation on last year, which seemed designed to spark maximum outrage and push the buttons of speakers and audience members. Instead this year features panels of three or four with generally sympathetic viewpoints, interspersed by 20-minute “sermons” by individuals.
As a consequence, there’s a contradictory sensibility to the program – it gives off the air of trying to force two sets of fundamentally opposing principles together in curatorial harmony.
Hence the presence of figures such as Claire Lehmann, editor of the rightwing online magazine Quillette, and members of its contributor stable, such as Coleman Hughes, 23-year-old African American commentator and Quillette columnist who has made a name for himself by arguing against things like slavery reparations for African Americans. On Thursday, in conversation with Lehmann, he said he believed “inequality is a part of the human condition”.
Yet on the same day we also heard from the delightful star of Rosehaven, Luke McGregor, who spoke warmly and hilariously about sex. The program also includes panels such as Saturday’s “Are you black enough?”, an all-Indigenous conversation featuring Stan Grant, Nakkiah Lui, Briggs and Daniel Browning discussing when and how representation becomes a burden. On Sunday a panel of journalists, including Hamish Macdonald and Damien Cave, will discuss whether the mainstream media is really “in a death spiral”.
And then there’s the ever-Walshian obsession with bringing everything back to biology. On Thursday the evolutionary biologist Diana Fleishmann argued, with Lehmann, that women who repeatedly end up in abusive relationships do so because they’re attracted to abusive men; that the best solution to gendered inequality in the home is to just “get yourself into a position” where you can pay someone else to do it; that the traditional biological family unit is the best defence against child abuse.
It feels barely worth listing the myriad objections to these ideas (although panel chair and Guardian columnist Jeff Sparrow did push back on some: women don’t choose to get beaten or murdered; most people can’t afford to pay for a cleaner, etc). But listening to the various sweeping generalisations made – particularly against the left – during events whose politics butted up against a clearly opposing program current, I did wonder who exactly the festival is for.
DDT is an ideas festival; it doesn’t present itself as trying to solve problems, only air ideas. But there’s a fundamental tension in the very structure of events like this.
If we think changing things is important – and many of the issues under discussion are very live topics associated with current events – then the stakes are quite high. Last year’s festival was a testament to the problems of trying to get a meaningful discussion or progress from pitting polemicists against each other.
But if we’re not trying to change things – if we’re interested only in the churning of ideas for its own sake – it makes the whole process feel like nothing other than a performance – theatrical, diverting, but ultimately little more than smoke and mirrors.
Only half the Odeon Theatre was open to patrons on Thursday and even then there were still many spare seats – perhaps a natural consequence of events held in the middle of a weekday before the festival proper even gets under way. Will the program bring in a bigger audience? Will the shift in structure allow ideas to be discussed in a more constructive way? There are still three days to go. Who knows what David Walsh will pull out of his bag of tricks?
• Guardian Australia was a guest of Tourism Tasmania and Dark Mofo
