There comes a time in every young woman’s life when she must grab a bitch by the synthetic ponytail, hold her wailing head steady, and punch her in the throat.

Perhaps, if your life is like mine, this moment will come more than once. Sometimes a fellow female needs to be taught that if she does not want her boyfriend cheating on her, she needs to take her concerns to him, not me. At least her boyfriend will have qualms about resorting to physical violence.

If your life is like mine you understand that getting into fights is inevitable, not because I am some crazy banshee who drinks too much and watched too much wrestling with her brothers back in the day. Yes, my very first childhood crush was on Bret “The Hitman” Hart. Still I would much rather be sitting pretty on a barstool, sipping on something  fruity while a hot guy whispers dirty things in my ear, than rolling around in a ditch with some girl’s ear in my teeth. I get into fights because women are mean to other women.

Yes. Women are mean to other women. It is a fact that has been well-documented and sneered by men with superiority complexes to one another. It is a fact whispered to little girls crying in their mother’s laps, after the shaven-headed, vicious little bitches in her class pulled her long hair.

Girl on girl violence is most often visited upon the pretty girls, the sexy girls, the liberated girls, and the working girls. The ones you like to call cunts, malayas and whores. You think it is us versus them, hoes versus housewifes, Madonna versus whore and never the twain shall meet. What you fail to realise however, is that all of us are hookers (though only some get paid in cash).

It is not always the obvious ones, the ones you see at the bar, in the club, tossing an expensive weave over her shoulder in Equator, the ones you want to be. Sometimes we’re peeking from behind a pair of glasses, or sitting behind you in a church pew.

Yeah, I said it, all of us are whores. True I have never had to bend over, lift my skirt high and display my wares to the government ministers, MPs and tycoons driving by, but I have ever sold my bedroom skills for a hot pair of shoes or a bed to sleep one drunken night. Don’t look at the page like that, as if you didn’t promise your husband 30 nights of blowjobs if he bought you a new car. Your currency may be cash, commodities, affection or good conversation, it’s all give and take sister (whether you take it like a bitch or like a good little girl, from behind or in the mouth, I won’t judge you)

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate me; I talk too damn much, I don’t volunteer with charitable organisations and I have been known to use foul language in front of small children. But don’t hate me because I won’t pretend that I don’t like to fuck (and your boyfriend likes that about me). End the violence!

This message of peace was brought to you by The Hitchhiker, with the support of Urban Legend Kampala.

This guy had just told a joke and Stella was mid-laugh, her mouth frozen open in a snapshot when she saw something across the bar.

Excusing herself from her friends she went in the opposite direction of whatever had caught her attention, towards the writhing mass of bodies on the dance floor. There she danced, alone, simply turning whenever a guy tried to approach her, hips-, or worse, crotch-first.

She would whirl, keeping time with the driving diwali riddim, to place a hand upon their chest and push them off, or a withering look upon their egos. Then she shouldered and shoved her way deeper into the vortex of humid, gyrating figures, to twerk near the woofer, to think in the quiet between each booming bass beat.

When she emerged, her brow a little damp, she left a heady scent of pheromones that left the men in her wake watching; attempting to theorise what it was about her that drew their eye. Was it the quick wit of her hips or the promise of heavy sighs in the curve of her lip? At the bar she ordered a Smirnoff Black and appeared indifferent to the double-take the tall, dark man beside her had done on seeing her.

“Stella?”

“Joe, hey.” She gave him a glance that spoke nothing of the depth of feeling between them, the sweat they had shared and the chasm of quiet that had stretched between them over the past year.

“You look great,” he said, and she believed him. He could say the corniest, most clichéd lines since Casanova made them famous and she would smell his bullshit a mile away. This, however she knew was true.

“Why, thank you,” and she allowed herself and him, a playful smile. “You don’t look half-bad yourself.”Indeed he looked great in his small, yellow t-shirt that told of hard abs beneath. She had seen him in it many times, back when the two of them would meet regularly in crowded bars, and then slip out to a lodge, or to her flat… but never to his place. He lived with his “saved” older sister, he had told her, who would not approve. She thought it more likely that his sister would not approve of Joe cheating on his girlfriend with 3 am booty calls and side dishes and probably a few one night stands.

“It’s too hot in here, let’s go outside,” he grasped her arm just above the elbow; a smooth motion, as though just one part in an inevitable sequence of events, the first lever of a Rube Goldberg machine.

She gently twisted out of his grip, “How’s the baby? Joseph Junior”. She would not make it that easy for him. “He’s fucking adorable,” she added, as always taking a perverse pleasure in the hard ‘k’, “I saw the pics on FB”.

“Yeah, and then you stopped talking to me.”

She shrugs like she doesn’t remember the reasons for it, or like she remembers and the reasons don’t matter anymore.

“I’ve missed you” he says, just above the roar of white noise of a loud, 1 am bar in Kampala; bottles clinking and crashing to the floor, drunks yelling more moisture than volume into the faces of patient bartenders, and always, the ever-driving ¾ beat. The ridiculous idea occurred to Stella that should the music stop, everyone would collapse to the floor like toy aliens in a Disney cartoon. She smiled almost inadvertently. Joe placed his hand on her thigh, her skin tingling where his mouth almost touched her neck as he leaned in to ask if she’d like another drink. She tipped her bottle, surprised to find it almost empty and nodded her head.

As happens in a club it became easier not to talk; conversation is quickly driven underground by the beat, the march of feet against wooden floor, and eventually one ends up talking with one’s body. Stella shifted ever-so-easily until she was leaning against him and they were grinding lazily to one delicious, sweat-drenched dem bow riddim after the other. This time when he took her elbow and began to lead her toward the door, she did not resist.

They ended up in the backseat of his friend’s car. Stella was being reminded that she liked the way Joe kissed her, like he was physically hungry for her, taking each of her fat lips into his mouth in turn. She let him suck on her neck, and paw at her blouse until her breast popped out like a ripe fruit, which he took in his mouth. Ripples of pleasure coursed across her body.

She did not resist when his mouth moved lower, encouraged him to keep moving when he spent too long around her navel by gently flexing her belly. He responded, lifting her skirt up and pressing his mouth on her clit through her rapidly-soaking cotton panties.

Stretching her long limbs so that her heels touched the driver’s headrest, he peeled her panties off and then, pausing, skipping one endless beat, he dove between her legs.

Christ, he was good at going down! Stella had missed this. He pressed his mouth hard upon her pubic bone, his tongue whirling around and around her most aroused parts. For a moment she worried that she was too drunk to cum but then she felt that familiar sensation of her body falling away and becoming only this glowing ball of pleasure in her pussy.  Her hands on the back of his head she pulled him into her, for once not caring if she suffocated him. And then she came. Wave upon glorious wave, she rocked, and shuddered and sighed and clenched…And released.

As her breathing steadied, he climbed up and kissed her mouth and she tasted herself, triumphant.

“That was fantastic” she told him.

She reached downward and found him, hard as a rock, straining against his jeans. He held himself above her, leaning on one hand as the other went to his unbuckle his belt. She took the opportunity to climb quickly into her panties.

“What are you doing?”He asked.

“Leaving” she answered, hand already on the door handle. He only stared at her in disbelief, mouth opening and closing like a fish. She stepped out, adjusted her skirt and blew him a kiss.

“Thank you,” she told the thousands of expressions moving and gathering across his face like threatening clouds. Then Stella walked away from Joe, back towards the insistent beat of the bar.