“In fact, the males very rarely take permanent mates.'His skin was so tan. 'Why not?''Because we tend to kill the females.'Ah, well, okay. That wasn't cool.”

“John's tattoo..Goddamn..He'd done it as a memorial to her-putting her name in his skin so she'd be with him always. After all, there was nothing more permanent than that-hell, that was why in the mating ceremony males got their backs carved up: Rings could get lost.”

“So, as you can see and if you reflect on it, awkward headed-females mating with beautifully normal headed-males is a bad idea.”

“It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.”

“He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn't take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them.'How very strange.'Yes, it is strange. I remember asking my employer, ' Then what do polar bears exist for?' ' Yes, exactly,' he said with a big smile. 'Then what do we exist for?”

“How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females.”