of one's sense of what is a "normal" human being and what is an
"exception", and I welcomed this new perspective. But I was not a writer at
that time - I was a physics grad student - and these issues didn't seem all
that close to my own life. When I started writing dialogues, though, things
changed. There came a point when it dawned on me that the characters in
my dialogues - Achilles, the Tortoise, the Crab, the Anteater, and a couple
of others with cameo roles - were without exception males. I was shocked
at my own having fallen victim to the unconscious pressures pushing against
the introduction of female characters. And yet, when I toyed with the idea
of going back and performing a "sex-change operation" on one or more of
these characters, that really rubbed me the wrong way. How come?
Well, all I could tell myself was, "Bring in females and you wind up
importing the whole confusing world of sexuality into what is essentially a
purely abstract discussion, and that would distract attention from my book's
main purposes." This nonsensical view of mine stemmed from and echoed
many tacit assumptions of western civilization at that time (and still today).
As I forced myself to grapple with my own ugly attitude, a real battle started
up in my mind, with one side of me arguing for going back and making
some characters female, and the other trying to maintain the status quo.
Out of this internal battle suddenly came a long and rather amusing
dialogue in which my various characters, having come to the realization that
they are all males, discuss why this might be so, and decide that, despite
their sense of having free will, they must in fact be merely characters in the
mind of some sexist male author. One way or another, they manage to
summon this Author character into their dialogue - and what does he do
when accused of sexism? He pleads innocent, claiming that what his brain
does is out of his control-the blame for his sexism must instead fallon a
sexist God. And the next thing you know, God poofs into the dialogue -
and guess what? She turns out to be female (ho ho ho). I don't remember
the details of how it went on from there, but the point is, I was deeply tom,
and I was grappling in my own way with these complex issues.
To my regret - that is to say, to the regret of the me of the years that
followed - the side that wound up winning this battle was the sexist side,
with just a few concessions to the other side (e.g., the tower of Djinns in the
dialogue "Little Harmonic Labyrinth", and Aunt Hillary in "Prelude ... Ant
Fugue"). GEB remained a book with a deep sexist bias sewn into its fabric.
Interestingly, it is a bias that very few readers, females or males, have
commented on (which in tum supports my belief that these kinds of things
are very subtle and insidious, and escape nearly everyone's perception).
As for generic "man" and "he", I certainly disliked those usages at that
time, and I tried to avoid them whenever I could (or rather, whenever it was
easy), but on the other hand I wasn't particularly concerned about cleansing
my prose of every last one of them, and as a consequence the book's pages
are also marred, here and there, by that more obvious, more explicit form
of sexism. Today, I cringe whenever I come across sentences in GEB that
talk about the reader as "he", or that casually speak of "mankind" as if
humanity were some huge abstract guy. One lives and learns, I guess.
Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-