Armed with one-liners on one-nighters, we pitch team against team to broach the topic of sex. Has the internet adjusted our template for ‘normal’? Is the gay marriage debate just the next step in a mainstreaming of difference that started generations ago? If so, what should be next? Join triple j’s Tom Ballard and Alex Dyson, sex therapist Bettina Arndt, academic Alan McKee, artist David ‘Ghostboy’ Stavanger, film maker Phoebe Hart and facilitator John Birmingham in what will be forever remembered as ‘The Great Mass-Debate’.

This session will contain adult themes and is not suitable for persons under 15 years of age.

Bettina Arndt
It was sex that made Bettina Arndt famous. As one of Australia’s first sex therapists and editor of Forum magazine, Bettina spent ten years talking about sex on television and radio. A trained clinical psychologist, she taught medical students, doctors and other professionals and talked endlessly about this fascinating subject to audiences all over Australia and overseas. By the 1980s she’d had enough of a good thing. She gave up sex -professionally speaking – and moved onto writing for newspapers and magazines about broader social. But after nearly twenty years, she returned to her first love and wrote a book about sex, The Sex Diaries, which became an international best-seller.

Tom Ballard
At the age of 21, Tom Ballard has performed stand-up comedy at numerous venues around Australia, is a regular on Network Ten’s The 7PM Project and co-hosts triple j’s national breakfast program with his silly friend, Alex Dyson. By 2006, Tom managed to become a three-time Class Clowns National Finalist and a RAW National finalist and in 2009 he brought his debut solo show, Tom Ballard Is What He Is to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and was the youngest person to ever take out the prestigious Best Newcomer Award.

Alex Dyson
After growing up in Warrnambool in regional Victoria, Alex Dyson began his radio career on local community station 3WAY FM. Working his way from 3WAY FM to the weekend breakfast slot on triple j with co-host Tom Ballard, in 2010 the dynamic pair became the youngest breakfast hosts in Australia.

Phoebe Hart
After completing her undergraduate degree in film and television production at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Phoebe Hart went on to be a finalist in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) race around the world and went on to work on various other projects with the ABC and Network 10. Since going freelance, Phoebe has continued to produce and direct documentaries and short films for inclusion in film festivals under the banner of hartflicker.  Her acclaimed mini-doc Dumpster Divers was a finalist for the Wild Spaces Pro-Cam Award and the ABC picked up her acclaimed long form documentary Orchids, which focuses on people living with intersex conditions.

Alan McKee
Alan McKee is a Professor in the Film and Television area at QUT and, along with Christy Collis, leads the development team for the new Creative Industries program in Entertainment Industries. Alan has written, co-written and edited six academic books and has written for television (Big Brother), radio (ABC 720), computer games (Scoot!), newspapers (Brother/Sister), magazines (DNA) and stand-up comedy (The Josh Thomas Variety Hour). The Weekend Australian wrote that Alan’s latest book, The Porn Report is: ‘engaging (and startling), confronting and confounding, and the argument is powerful and backed up by some persuasive statistics’.

David Stavanger
Ghostboy – David Stavanger’s bent alter ego – first emerged in 2004 from a small wooden box following a diagnosis by the W.H.O of acute performance poetry influenza to infect a live audience. Ghostboy is part spoken weird / part poet / part cabaret theatre / part surrealist psychotherapy / part carnie / part ringmaster. Self described small poet with a big pen, David is a Slam MC with a mouth your mother wouldn’t wish on a mule.

Facilitator: John Birmingham
John Birmingham is a Brisbane based author, well known for his book He Died with a Felafel in his Hand, which became a cult youth cult favourite, a play and a bestseller. It was the Guardian’s book of the week and was described by Loaded as “one of the funniest books ever”.  John has also written for Brisbane Times and The Monthly.

Fringe Ideas
Fringe Ideas are those that your mother doesn’t want to hear at the dinner table, those ideas that get stuck in your head at 3am on a hot and balmy night. They’re ideas that you don’t talk too loudly about at the pub for fear of being branded an iconoclast or a degenerate. From weather-induced zombie-apocalypse nightmare scenarios, to the shifting sexual norms of the technology generation, the Fringe Ideas program, held throughout the Festival, promises to be a small but cheeky program of events and activities.

The Frige Ideas program is presented in proud partnership with The Edge.