I’ll take that piece of ass to go
Some dude has gone and written a song about fast food – Chips Funga he’s calling it – and he’s managed to make it sound romantic. Sexy, even. Who knew takeout would sound as good as it tastes? I guess it depends what kind of takeout you’re talking about. If it walks and talks and is still in your bed in the morning, it might very well be sexy. Or at least it was the night before when you picked it up to go.
It is most undignified to say ‘it’ when you mean ‘her’, then again ‘chips funga’ is even more debasing, perhaps only less so than ‘sausage funga’. Almost every woman I know has had a one-night-stand. In our days we called it what it was, and it wasn’t something we were proud of. It usually happened after a drunken night out and most of the time the details were scanty. You would wake up in a strange bed at about 12.30 in the afternoon, with a trail of dried up spittle down your left cheek, and a thick mist blurring your vision.
Stumbling, you’d pull on last night’s clothes – a neon pink micro-mini dress with sequins or something similarly ridiculous – and then tiptoe out of the bedroom as though you knew God was watching. You’d walk toward the sound of a TV turned on low to find the stranger you slept with watching music videos in his boxers. “Hey, you’re up,” he says. “Errm…should I call you a cab?” And that would be that. Sheepishly, you go ahead and do the walk of shame, promising yourself that you would never go home with a guy again. As I say, it wasn’t something we were proud of.
Today, it’s a whole different ball game. There is little difference between some Kenyan women and an actual French fry, especially if you’re discussing the speed at which both can be packed, taken away and then discarded. Funga’ing chips is the expected end to a night out. It is no longer a shameful secret, something that you whispered about with your girlfriends in conspiratorial tones. It’s a way of life. The new ‘norm’.
This is all well and good. We’re living in the age of same sex marriage, legalised marijuana and Nicki Minaj so it is safe to say that anything goes. To each her own, and all the rest of it. We forget however, that the right to be ‘fungwa’d’ comes with responsibility. Don’t get it twisted; even a grown woman will have a hard time reconciling indiscriminate sexual activity with her personal sense of self worth. You might want to think that ‘it’s just sex’ but then you would be wrong. You are a mind-body-soul continuum and when a man enters your body, his presence there taps into all of that. If you’re not having protected intercourse, then your health will be the first green bottle to fall off the wall. But even if you’re using a barrier method to keep disease out, have you protected your mind? Is there a condom over your heart? One-night-stands leave a lasting imprint on your psyche and few many women have figured out how to erase it. A grown woman may use her adulthood as an excuse to make her own sexual choices, as if being over 18 somehow makes you immune to the consuming effects of dubious sexual encounters. But what about the teenage girl who’s joined the ‘chips funga’ band wagon just because everyone else is doing it? Does she really have any idea what she’s getting herself into? Most probably not. And yet, somehow grown women have managed to make the ‘chips funga’ phenomenon cool. You know what? It’s so not.
