“What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.” Iron John/Robert Bly
I was 30 when Robert Bly’s best selling book Iron John was published, and it was fashionable for men to talk about cultivating enlightened manliness, the hairy beast within. Bly wasn’t celebrating aggression or chest-beating. He was diagnosing something — that men had been cut off from any meaningful passage into adulthood, that without initiation they stayed boys in men’s bodies, angry and lost. This was years before anyone coined the term “toxic masculinity,” and whatever you think of Bly’s methods, he was asking a real question.
I knew men that were going on weeks long canoe man-quests in the Boundary Waters, group camping trips where men could be men, go shirtless into the woods, shit in the woods, sit around campfires sharing feelings while still reveling in the sounds of group farting. A high school friend was part of a men’s group that went on an “Initiation Mountain Climbing” trip, where boys became men by conquering their fear of climbing a mountainside, conquering the stone wall to become more in touch with inner and outer strength.
I wasn’t interested in that kind of manly thing. Instead, I liked to talk, think, and converse, in the comforts closer to home.
For several years I attended a therapeutic men’s group that did not have such lofty physical goals. Rather, it was made up of 6 to 8 grown guys who would gather once a week to sit in chairs and talk about the challenges in their lives, about work, marriage, women, feelings. It set an example for me of how casual conversations, in this case happening with a group of grown men, without any rules, was so revelatory. The therapist who ran the group, had encouraged me to reveal some of the dark secrets I had been carrying, about being raped when I was 11 years old by a camp counselor. That alone was worth it.
I don’t remember many of the conversations we had on those evenings, because at the time my mind was plagued by the implosion of my marriage. But the questions of manliness, of being a dude, were central to our conversations. What is it about being a man that is important, and different than being a woman? Why do men hide their feelings, whilst women are more likely to express them?
My takeaway from all of those years of learning to man up was that men are more likely to respond to criticism with anger, will tend towards confrontation when unfairly challenged, and are more likely to define themselves by what they do in the world than who they are in the world. I’m probably wrong, but it seems correct.
Being a man in the world, or identifying as a man in the world, used to feel really important to me. In some ways it still does, but the identity of being male really doesn’t follow me, because identity in general is a construct. Naming something doesn’t make it so. It is simply the language we use to identify a thing, an attribute, a dimension. I’m a biological male matches with what I see on my body, but everything else that is me, that I identify as me, is about what I have done, or do. I’m married, because we said we are. I’m white, so what. I’m a writer, producer, photographer, brother, son, friend. True. But who I am being in my pursuit of those things, in my life, is the most important piece of me that I truly control.
Rapist! Sexual Predator! Harasser!
These are the labels that have been applied to me since the arrest in 2018. For some, they are true and actually describe what they know of me. They’ll go on social media and describe me using these terms and worse. The press will write about me, quoting others who will use these terms. They are describing and naming a thing that doesn’t exist, and yet it carries a cost to me as a human being because people believe that is what I am.
This is really important to how to think about people like me, who have been mercilessly dragged after being wrongfully accused. These terms, like rapist, are less about naming a person than defining a condition they represent.
Think about the word “rapist.” It doesn’t describe a person it, conjures a monster. A category so far outside the bounds of acceptable humanity that the person wearing the label ceases to exist as a person at all. Once the word attaches, everything that came before, being a man, being married, a professional a good person is chewed up. You’re not man who was accused of rape, you are rape, walking around in a man’s body.
That’s not an accident. The word is deployed to do that. And in cases where it’s true, where a real man did a real thing to a real woman, that obliteration may be exactly what justice requires. But this ugly machinery doesn’t come with a shutoff switch. It doesn’t pause to ask whether the word fits the man. It simply runs, and runs, and runs. And when it runs on the wrong man, what gets destroyed isn’t just a reputation. It’s the entire architecture of a self.
I’ve never asked anyone to take what I say on faith. I don’t want your belief. I want your skepticism, applied consistently, to everything, including the person who accused me. That’s not a defense strategy. That’s the minimum requirement for thinking clearly about anything.
Because here's what happens when skepticism gets selectively suspended: a tent goes up. And inside that tent, evidence does not matter. Context does not matter. The distance between a wrongful accusation and an actual conviction does not matter. We are all the same man. I am Carr Hagerman-Rapist, and that hyphen will outlast anything I ever write or say or do. 3333
This is not just my problem. Every person who has ever wanted justice, real justice, not the kind you perform, has a stake in whether skepticism gets applied to everyone or just to the people it's convenient to doubt. The tent doesn't sort for guilt. It sorts for accusation. And once that becomes acceptable, you've decided that the process doesn't matter. That evidence doesn't matter. That you don't matter, until the day you do.
The issue is not that men are uniquely incapable of admitting fault. It is that an admission of error feels like defeat rather than repair. In other words, just like everyone else in the world, failure is usually a fault of something we’ve done.
A recent discussion on Facebook between my brother and an extended family member over my guilt as a rapist is instructive. This cousin insisted I was guilty because he knew some women at the renaissance festival who were uncomfortable with me. Over what? Who knows. My brother suggested that rather than take the words of a third person, why not call and talk to me about what actually happened. I have irrefutable evidence, after all, and I’d be happy to share it at their leisure. But every option and offer was declined. He said: “We won’t talk to a rapist.”
My cousin is wrong, but he’s in a camp of believers that say to question an accusation is a betrayal, and that seeking evidence first is tantamount to violence, because one is questioning the survivor. It’s a closed system that won’t accept corrected inputs. He cannot accept being wrong, because to do so would be to admit a crack in his certainty. My guilt is the premise, not the conclusion. His certainty, along with many others like him, is built on a conspiracy where the judge or jury were somehow tampered with, bought and paid for by the Festival’s owner, or some other fractured storyline. The video showing that I was somewhere else at the time of the alleged rape was posted on Facebook Live, on the festival’s own Facebook page, and cannot be manipulated. It’s not that they won’t acknowledge this as substantial evidence that led a jury to quickly acquit. It’s that they literally cannot comprehend it as even possible. My guilt is so obvious to them as to need no further inquiry. These are otherwise bright people who choose to believe a really dumb thing.
This brings me back to the men's group. Their collective wisdom wasn't about polishing your image or being righteous and steadfast in your convictions. A better man — a better human being — is one who understands he's wrong more often than not. Not as a failure. As a condition of being alive. We operate in a very small field of what we actually know, and the gap between that and everything else is enormous. Being wrong isn't the exception. It's the default. And once you really accept that, not as an idea but as a daily operating reality, kindness stops being a virtue you practice and starts being the only thing that makes sense. If I don't know, and you don't know, and none of us know as much as we think we do, then the least defensible thing in the world is cruelty. And the most logical response to another person is gentleness.
Fuck you feels better in short, but love you feels better in the long. It only took me 60 years to finally put it together.
