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Yours or Mine

Written for Rated XXXY, a fundraiser for Intersex Society of North America that took place in October 2002.


I Love My Cunt.

"I love my cunt." That's what the pin button on my t-shirt says, a pink mass-manufactured feel-good pop-feminist symbol stuck on my chest. In fact, I almost bought a pair of tiny "I Love My Cunt" panties I found online before I realized that my ass wouldn't actually fit into one of those "large" size. Can you believe it, the society apparently believes that fat women don't wear panties. Yes they do! Or maybe they believe that fat girls love, LUV, big, bulky, beige undergarments that look like they've been recycled from old newspaper, you can almost see the headline: "President Denies the Cigar Incident."

Of course as an Asian girl, I'm not even supposed to exist. Women of other races can be fat, and still exist, albeit as a joke, an object of ridicule. Fat Asian girls on the other hand are simply non-existent anywhere. Nowdays you can pick from 147 channels beaming from the space, but you still won't find me, I guess I'm really original, some sort of perverse exotic. Which sucks for me as a sex worker though, because there is no such nitch genre of fat Asian girl fetishism. It seems to me that all the Asian fetishists like their Asian girls skinny, and all the fat fetishists want their fat girls with huge tits and asses, not typical for Asian women. But no matter how many men think that I'm some pathetic fat ugly whore-wannabe of some unknown nationality (cuz I cannot possibly be an Asian), I find comfort in the fact that they still pay me for my pussy, and not the other way around.

That brings us back to the subject of cunts: I love 'em. But one time, I had a friend tell me that she didn't have a cunt. "Yeah?" I said, not knowing whether to begin my pop-feminist cunt-is-a-sacred-word-that-came-from-some-foreign-goddess routine, as factually dubious and culturally appropriating as it may be, before I remembered that she was a transsexual woman. Awkward silence was broken when she said, "well I feel like I have a vagina, but not a cunt." Vagina? It was a new piece of information to me, because I didn't know that she had one of those. You see, cunt is a general word for the whole region which may or may not include any specific part. But vagina, it means something very very specific: the hole. "Well it's not about how it looks," she said, "I feel like I have a vagina. I can feel it inside. But not cunt. What about you? Do you really love your cunt?"

I knew immediately that it was my fault. I invited this question redirected to me by asking too many questions. "I don't know," I said, which wasn't fair because she had answered all of my questions unlike me. But I hadn't really thought about having any part of the body to love or to hate. I mean, wasn't "I Love My Cunt" some kind of feminist cliche anyway? Does it mean anything? But the more I think about whether or not I love or hate my cunt, or the rest of the body for that matter, I feel lost, unable to point finger at whatever it is that I am supposed to think about.

I think of these men in white gowns putting an stainless specula between my thighs to size me up, the nurse holding a polaroid camera while another nurse held down my arms. I think, is this my cunt, or is this yours? I don't even know what my cunt looked like before that metal touched my skin. I don't even know how it felt if it was my fingers touching me, and not theirs covered up in yellowy white latex.

I think of that man who dragged me into the back seat of a red sedan on Valencia. I think, is this my body, or is this yours? I think of my invisible fat Asian body, my ridiculed, despised, and still paid for body, am I yours, or am I mine? I dissociate from reality, I skip time and space, I get lost from my body, in my body, out of my body. Now.

I live outside of feminist slogans: loving one's body is nice, but for me it's a luxury. I am too busy trying to love myself to love my stains, scars, memories. But one can feel something that's missing outside, it's more than imagination or fantasy; it's the purest form of self-acceptance in a world that hates my body.