Summer Field Notes, Circa 2025

This was the summer of meeting up at the beach to talk about artificial intelligence. My good friend shakes out her towel and says she thinks she’s losing her brother to the manosphere. We decide he’s young, impressionable, and probably just looking for a way to belong.

I don’t know much about the manosphere. I assume it’s those entrepreneurs-in-cars who pop up on my feed and call me a femcel. From what I gather, it’s about men falling behind in education and earning capacity, and an existential resentment about not being able to give birth. I can relate to the latter. It’s a strange feeling to put a full stop on millions of years of ancestral evolution.

But it’s hard to reconcile the mean-spirited online personas with the men I know in real life, who are so often gentle, thoughtful, and kind.

Maybe this is the backlash against feminism we were warned about, which would explain why I’ve been working through my neglected stack of feminist theory. I like the idea that feminism returns as needed.

Lately, I’ve been reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, her 1970 exploration of how women’s limited perceptions of ourselves shape our lives.

I especially liked the chapter on romance, where she describes how romantic stories soothe women — how they offer escape from the drudgery of unpaid emotional and domestic labour. Greer writes that romantic storytelling flourished among bored homemakers alongside the invention of the printing press.

She says men don’t understand how deeply entrenched women are in romantic fantasy. But I think the womanizers probably do. And the drearier my schedule, the more susceptible I become to wishful thinking — romance becomes a kind of escape hatch: a fantasy of being chosen, seen, swept away.

On the drive home from the beach, windows down and music up, I wonder if the answer isn’t to shut the door on romance completely, but to meet it with open eyes. After all, the romantic brain is millions of years old, older than language itself, wired to light up at the possibility of connection.

And maybe there’s a romance, too, in becoming.

In knowing ourselves better.

In trusting our bodies.

In expressing our creativity.

In living beyond the need to be saved.

What the TikTokers might call “main character energy.”

The sun is warm on my face, the wind in my hair, the sand from the afternoon still between my toes. For now, I’m finally content in the quiet romance of my own life.

#romance #becoming #maincharacterenergy

Germaine Greer's The Female Enoch at the beach