Why We Were Danforth

Over the course of the spring and summer of 2016, Charles Norwood and I co-wrote and self-published a novella entitled The Feminist Pimp. If nothing else, the story delivers on its title, charting the confused life of and bizarre intrigues surrounding its eponymous protagonist, one Mr. Beauvoir. Many of the scenes wrote themselves, and the book was a pleasure from the planning phase straight through to “publication.”

But there was a complication. If Big Chucky Norwood and Little Johnny Gosham have anything in common, it’s a bit of a Neo-Victorian streak. What that means is that any time one or both of us is having too much fun with something, we assume that surely it must exact some sort of existential price. This might be the reason we initially found each other in the hinterland of unpublished writers looking to collaborate (It might also be what led us to write about an industry where every pleasure has an agreed-upon price). Accordingly, we assumed with certitude that anything as fun as The Feminist Pimp was too good to be true.

More saliently, we were well aware of the volatile nature of the subject matter. There was, after all, in 2016, a gaining social justice movement that seemed to genuinely enjoy being offended. The oxymoron that is our main character—our hero—was a man who profited off women's bodies while at the same time championing women's rights. If The Feminist Pimp got any traction, we knew that it could be a powder keg of offensiveness. Any given underemployed arts baccalaureate with a social justice slant and a blog could have a field day cherry-picking the grittier scenes from The Feminist Pimp and labelling them as “problematic.” Truth be told, Chuck and I knew there were problematic elements—it was precisely these legitimate conflicts within the main character, as well as in his employees and his less-progressive competitors, that we wanted to milk for madcap comedy and social commentary.

But bloggers weren't our worst fear. We were most afraid of our own friends and coworkers, most of whom swing leftward politically (as do Chuck and I, by the way), and have never been afraid to call out a perceived injustice. Chuck and I feared the awkwardness of these potential call-outs, especially since they would probably involve injustices that we ourselves were very aware of. We just wanted to write a silly book predicated on these injustices and maybe make some money at it.

And so, before we ever put pen to paper, we decided upon writing The Feminist Pimp under a pen-name. Not two pen-names, but one for the both of us, which I suppose we assumed made us even less identifiable. The name would have to be androgynous, too, further veiling our identity and making the author's positionality less problematic than that of two white dudes. With these parameters set, we then spat out the most boring, lazy name could think of. And so Pat Danforth was born.

Once we set to work writing the actual manuscript, we made a pleasant discovery. The book wasn't ultimately that offensive. Oh, it had its questionable parts—for instance, Mr. Beauvoir's “I have a dream” speech. But what we found as we moved through the chapters is that the book was undeniably feminist. In fact, the last chapter includes an encouraging and concerted message about feminism with which I don't think any feminist would disagree. If Charles and I had doubted the strength of our feminism at the outset of the project (e.g. insofar as we could exploit such a potentially offensive idea), we didn't by the end. Having completed The Feminist Pimp, we the authors realized that we were feminists.

In July of 2016, The Feminist Pimp appeared exclusively on Amazon Kindle. Norwood and I didn't even have the collective cojones to send it out for legitimate publication. We figured the book's title alone would render it dead-on-arrival for most publishers, given the liberal sensibilities one assumes of small presses. Moreover, Chuck and I were still deluded enough to believe that the idea—the paradox of a feminist pimp—could sell itself. Needless to say, The Feminist Pimp sold very poorly. Nonetheless, its publication marked the beginning of a productive collaborative relationship between Chuck and me, which culminated in a few legitimate publications (see, for instance, "The Centaurist Manifesto.")

In the four years that followed, The Feminist Pimp was never fully out of mind for either of us. Even as Charles and I managed a few more publications to our credit, we still thought about Mr. Beauvoir. We were starting to get our due as writers, but Mr. Beauvoir wasn't getting his.

And as our careers were transforming with the passage of time, so too was the world. By November of 2016, the American people had elected Donald Trump as their president. Here was a man who had bragged on record about groping women without their consent. Here was a man who, as a sitting president, would go on to speak sympathetically about marauding hordes of neo-Nazis and would defend Confederate monuments tooth-and-nail. Here was a man who would teargas protesters to clear the way in front of church so that he could pose there with a Bible. Here is a man letting two pandemics—systemic racism and the coronavirus—go on unchecked. Trump was and is the totemic animal of a white America rediscovering its foundational bigotry. Trump is the apotheosis of a significant section of the American populace—Caucasian and androcentric—that has embraced this bigotry and all its attendant chauvinisms in full.

In short, our current reality looks far more offensive than anything in the fictional world of The Feminist Pimp.

The sorry state of western society has had its upsides, though. Leftists near and far from center, and even some conservatives, have seen that protest against systemic discrimination is not only in order but absolutely necessary. The most salient examples come from the protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that has subsequently become pervasive in popular culture. Similarly, the Me Too Movement has been making tangible progress in removing privileged predators from seats of power.

And so, the offended-by-everything social justice movement of 2016 has evolved and matured into more constructive forms of social protest. I think most of us would agree that the protests that occurred all across the United States in 2020 have been and are more productive and beneficial than, say, independent acts of bloggers crying foul about fiction writers’ choice of topics (to say nothing of throwaway comedic eBooks).

With that being the case, in this year synonymous with hindsight, Norwood and I took a good, long look at The Feminist Pimp once again. Why not put our names on it? Is it really anything to be overly ashamed of? In a world of pervert presidents propped up by racist voting bases, probably not. And there's also the matter of marketing to consider, too. While Norwood and Gosham aren't bestsellers by any stretch, the handful of “legitimate” publications we have to our credit makes us more of a commodity than dear Pat Danforth, god rest his or her or their soul.

In this spirit of better marketing, I'll go ahead and make the suggestion to you, the person reading this, that you head over to Amazon and check out The Feminist Pimp. By doing so, you can take up these vexing questions of whether or not the book is sexist, and if its authors are indeed feminists or actually the exact opposite. Read to the very end and decide for yourself.

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The Feminist Pimp eBook is available here for less than a buck!