“The intricate and different life cycles of both male and female root-heads, and the great behavioral sophistication shown by the female in reconfiguring a host crab as a support system, all underscore the myopia of our conventional wisdom in regarding rhizocephalans as degenerate parasites because the adult anatomy of internal roots and external sac seem so simple.”

—  Stephen Jay Gould , book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 371
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

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Stephen Jay Gould 274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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“Lernaeodiscus porcellanae turns control of the host into a fine art. After castration by the parasite, male crabs develop female characteristics in both anatomy and behavior, while females become even more feminized. The emerging externa then takes the same form and position as the crab's own egg mass… The crabs then treat the externa as their own brood. In other words, the parasite usurps all the complex care normally invested in the crab's own progeny.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 368
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“The parasite has somehow evolved to turn off the host's defenses, presumably by disarming the crab's immune response with some chemical trickery that fools the host into accepting the parasite as part of itself. …The adult parasite castrates the host, not by directly eating the gonadal tissue, but by some unknown mechanism probably involving penetration of the interna's roots around and into the crab's nervous system.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 367
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

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“Should or can there be a single standard of behavior for both sexes? Is there such a thing as a biologically rooted female culture that should remain separate from male culture, partly because it is different than or superior to male culture?

Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), p. 346, and see Women and Madness (1972), p. 298 (similar text).
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“In short, the root-head turns the crab into a Darwinian cipher, a feeding machine working entirely in the parasite's service. The castrated crab can make no contribution to its own evolutionary history; its "Darwinian fitness" has become flat zero. …But ever so carefully, for the parasite must maintain the crab in constant and perfect servitude - not draining the host enough to kill this golden goose, but not letting the crab do anything for its own Darwinian benefit.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 369
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Daniel Suarez photo

“Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female—making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. … Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat… and parasitism evolves and moves through any system—not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it…”

Daniel Suarez Daemon

Source: Daemon (2006), Chapter 31: Red Queen Hypothesis, Character: Sobol

“Whoredom and bastardy are defects with regard to a female slave, but not with regard to a male ; because the object in the purchase of female slave, is cohabitation and the generation of children...”

Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani (1117–1197) muhaddith, faqih and author (1135-1164)

Al-Hidayah (593 AH, 1197 CE), Charles Hamilton's translation, 1791
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“Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male, because the female is as it were a deformed male.”

Aristotle book Generation of Animals

Generation of Animals as translated by Arthur Leslie Peck (1943), p. 175
Generation of Animals

“Love is not dependency or sex, but is friendship, and, therefore, love can't exist between two males, between a male and a female or between two females, one or both of whom is a mindless, insecure, pandering male; like conversation it can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent, groovy female females, as friendship is based on”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

respect, not contempt.
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 10 ("respect, not contempt." (not bracketed in original) not certain in original due to truncation of bottom of photocopy page but consistent with it).

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“It would be ridiculous to talk of male and female atmospheres, male and female springs or rains, male and female sunshine…. how much more ridiculous is it in relation to mind, to soul, to thought, where there is as undeniably no such thing as sex, to talk of male and female education and of male and female schools. [written with Elizabeth Cady Stanton]”

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) American women's rights activist
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“That nature acts differently upon the sexes is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social conventions. The results, according to statistics of sexual frequency: male satyriasis and female nesting. The male homosexual has more sex than his heterosexual counterpart; the female homosexual less often than hers, a radical polarization of the sexes along a single continuum of shared sexual nonconformity. Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 26

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