“The Dragonfly Summer Week is the place to be yourself together”

Peter Heerschop attended the Libelle Zomerweek and he liked it very much.

I went to the Libelle Summer Week. I was invited as a columnist and was to be interviewed there. I felt like it. Then I could see the people who might be reading my pieces. To be safe, I hadn’t told my wife where I was going.

I said I was going to help friends cut down a tree.

On my way there it turned out that I had been mistaken about the magnificence of the Libelle Zomerweek. I ended up in a huge traffic jam on the only access road. And it wasn’t a few tents. It was a huge festival site, a complete village.

But the most striking thing struck me immediately as I walked from the parking lot to the entrance. Streams of people, yes, but almost all women. A lot of women. Thousands of women.

Here and there a man, but you also saw him looking around with a look of ‘they are indeed very many and I don’t understand that I had to come along.’ On the site itself, it soon became clear to me that in the end I had little to contribute.

So this is the feeling you have as a woman when you enter a cafe with only men, who slap each other on the shoulders and shout just a little too loud what they all think of women and what they can do with it. This mainly indicates that they do not have to arrive at home with such talk.

There were many different women there at the Libelle Summer Week. Really, a lot of different women, but it felt like a very close group to me. All aware of a number of secret agreements that you as a man could not come to. It was a huge ‘covenant of women’.

Surprisingly, they were all very cheerful. And very very kind to me. Laughing sweetly, greeting very kindly, yet it seemed as if they were nodding at the same time – invisible to me – at each other.

“We’ve seen him, he’s harmless, leave him alone.”

Sometimes one of the women wanted to take a picture with me. But then they would always say: “It’s for my husband.”

I certainly felt the message of that. Namely: don’t think that you are really one of us, you belong to another category, a category that will never fully understand us.

There was tremendous togetherness. A great sense of freedom and confidence. This was the place to be yourself together.

I just felt less and less myself. I was totally taken by the environment. I suddenly felt like getting my nails done, going for a cover photo with friends and signing up for a sustainable gardening course.

But especially to feel the same care towards each other.

Just to be part of it.

I saw the beauty of the peace of not having the other person’s nagging for a while. Not bothered by the judgmental sighing of someone like me.

It wasn’t until I saw that and I was asked, “Would you like a coffee and a strawberry cream pastry?”

I said, “I will.”

Laughing, they said, “Well, so do we, so if you could get it for us now.”

I didn’t dare refuse. As I walked away, I heard them confirm each other with: “I absolutely cannot get my own husband here. He is also terrified of us.”

When I got home, my wife said that several of her friends had seen me at the Libelle Zomerweek.

They had laughed at my face.

Then I was sure.

Men are losers after all.