Casual Sex; a Bunch of Random Thoughts

And then came a Friday.

Last week people came with their serious things on how you can get the job you want by being like a tree. Got a lot of positive feedback from that one. Big up, ABJ. We are waiting for the last part of the series.

I have been banging my head in a bid to find how best I can fit ABJ's big shoes.The relief came yesterday when I was going through my Facebook news feed. The perusal got me to see one long post by Pemphero "Jack Richmonds" Mphande. Those of you who know the idiot would agree with me that he is a good writer who always weaves long Facebook posts tackling real life issues.

I would have loved to copy the whole post and to embed it into this article, but that would have made this article too long for a Friday. A summary Will have to do, then.

The exemplified and personalized article that the Honorable Chancellor of the Revolution wrote was about some girl who happened to be masquerading as a student at one of the private tertiary institutions in Blantyre while in real sense she was in town hawking her womanhood with the various merchants in town. The post attracted comments from many people who collaborated his take, pointing out that some of these girls we see in Malawi Institute of Tourism uniforms do actually belong to the institution. Tiberedwa mtauni muno ndithu. Muberedwa, rather.

The whole story sort of ignited memories of a discussion I had with a friend on the interesting trends surrounding sex in the later days. I happened to be asking this friend (who like many others happens to be about 9 years or so older) if young people (well, just people) used to have as much sex as they do in the later days and if people used to engage in casual sex like they do. His answer was as good as you might have guessed. There has been an exponential increase in the two things.

The same piece also ignited a memory of a program some friends of mine recorded at Radio Maria.  This was the Nthawi ya Achinyamata kind of thing and the topic of discussion on the day was the issue of casual sex; wadya balalikani. For some reason I decided not to participate in the recording of the program and I did not get to listen to the program. I, on the other hand, am of the assumption that some of the insights that I share are the same those hypocrites shared (I know they will stone me when they read this).

While the issue of casual, premarital and extramarital sex may not be a heavily avoided issue in public fora, it is something that is happening and on the rise. Trendy, if I am allowed to use those kinds of words. One man lamented on how sex ends up on many people's weekend to do list; for this Saturday, I will wake up, do some laundry, shopping, go out for lunch, then take out some poison on whosoever before proceeding with my other activities. While conservatives may cry out about this, it is the culture of liberals and this is not changing anytime soon. From the look of things, at least.

Before we all get to pointing fingers at young ladies hiding in Chitawira hostels, we need to take a moment and also recognize the very people who are making their trade thrive. There are a lot of tycoons in town who are benefiting from these "BIU students", real or otherwise. Having stayed in a hostel with students from a couple of private colleges, I got to appreciate how people can park a car outside a girls hostel, get out with plastic bags full of pleasantries and go in the room for 30 minutes or so before speeding off having gotten chakudya cha lero. This might sound like your typical Nollywood motion picture, but it is happening in our midst. Mwamva makolo mukutumiza ana ku self boarding inu? Anyway. I strayed. Point is that there are people who are spending preponderant sums on these "students".

Then there is the modern day young graduate. Munthu win a oopsa kwabasi. Here is one guy who struggled through secondary and tertiary education only to land on a job with big returns, a ride and a house (probably a furnished one). The blessing ends up being too big to share and girls become the beneficiaries. These are the very people who besides their nice house in Kanjedza or Sunnyside also rent another house in Zingwangwa. A slaughter house of some sort, only furnished with a single bed, matress and dirty beddings. What happens there? Well. Y'all already know.

One might wonder if people still have the HIV pandemic and STIs at the back of their minds when they engage in such behaviour or whether it is the "it can't happen to me" attitude that is at play.

We have spent some time highlighting the problem here and one would wonder whether this issue has a solution considered the depth of the same. Perhaps we should scare each other a bit.

HIV continues to terrorize us and that should be on thing that should keep us from kugwiragwira. I shouldn't say much about this.

Those of you who subscribe to religion also know of the repercussions that come with promiscuous behaviour. I like the Muslim teaching of how things will end like for people who engage in such behaviour. Scary.

The message I would want to preach on this one is that of moral brightness, though. Some things just feel wrong despite religious inclinations and that should be a reason for us to stay away from zinthu zinazi.

It is probably time we all realized that some things are best done with some reasonable commitment and that this notion of friends with benefits is alien to humanity itself. Adding to that, there is no trophy one gets for sleeping with the most people. And then there are the financial implications too.

Signing out, I would like to pose this piece as a challenge to you. There are a lot of people from the opposite gender. Not everyone of them have to be ours to undress.

If it's not HIV scaring us or our religious teachings putting up some impediments, it has to be our moral campus directing us away from this behaviour of not holding our loins.

Umulungu ndi Umunthu utitsutse.