Women Living Large

I love Kristen Houghton’s, author of “And Then I'll Be Happy! Stop Sabotaging Your Happiness,” post on Huffington Post today: Weight: Why One Size Doesn't Fit All.

Houghton is clearly a Stripper Mom as she explains how she used to be the “fat girl,” but that it’s something that most people don’t know about her. She doesn’t go around announcing it to everyone she meets, but she sees that it does affect her today and she’s not ashamed to “admit” her past.

She was fortunate enough to meet an inspiring professor in college who helped her to embrace the body she had as she worked on creating a new relationship to herself; it is through that process that she ended up losing the excess weight.

It definitely seems like times are changing for women when I look around. There obviously is still a bias toward slender women in the media, but I think there’s change brewing.

Ah…I foresee a world where women can live as themselves, being just who they are, looking the way they look, and feeling good about themselves.

We won’t be afraid of our pasts, our presents, or our futures.

Christmas Wishes

The Christmas spirit wants to fill me, wants to deck my halls, wants to skip through fields of Christmas trees.

And my children wouldn’t mind if the Christmas spirit paraded me through a toy store with credit card in hand.

But as most people are this year, we’re trying to reign in the joy, well, not the joy, but the spending.

The old age question arises, which would you rather have as a child? A bunch of small gifts or one big special thing that you really want?

I’m trying to find a happy medium—a special something that’s kind of spectacular and a bunch of cool, inexpensive doo-dads. That’s what I think I would have liked. There’s just something so spectacular about seeing a big old pile of shiny boxes under the tree in the morning.

We all want to know that our needs are going to be met.

And it’s just kind of cool when we discover that (sometimes, not always) our desires will be heard and met, too.

JWoww's Greatest Dream

Gossip Cop quotes Jersey Shore’s JWoww on posing for Maxim magazine’s January 2012 issue as being “probably my highest accomplishment.”


My immediate reaction is of ridicule, but we have certain definitions of success that (hopefully) change a bit as we age, huh?

I remember when I was in my twenties that getting a part in a show or just imaging my big dreams of landing a part in a movie coming to fruition were my biggest aspirations.

It’s interesting what we see as being our highest accomplishments when we’re in our twenties, isn’t it?

It’s a bit sad that many women (the old me included) see appearing on a magazine cover in a bikini as our greatest achievement.

I know though that there are many women who do not need the hindsight of experience to realize there are many greater aspirations.

The question maybe should be, what can we do as a society to encourage women to hold greater dreams from their childhoods forward?

Are People Involved in Porn Inherently Bad?

Perez Hilton reports on Perezitos about how an “Ex Gay Porn Actor Tried To Teach High School, But Fox News Put An End To That!”


This man, Kevin Hogan, who was in three gay porn films eventually moved on to another career—English teacher. And now that parents and the school has found out about his past, there is outrage.

Perez Hilton thinks it goes to him being gay, but I would strongly disagree with that. To me, it sounds like the problem is that he chose to be in porn at all. He is now on paid leave.

I want to know why what someone did in their past, which isn’t illegal, has any bearing on who they are today and what they are capable of. Even better, even if someone was involved in something illegal, why should that matter if they are a different person today?

I am proud of who I am today, but I refuse to hide my past. Yes, I was a stripper. Yes, there are photographs of me in the world.

But I am a good mom. And I am a good English teacher. But no, I was not born those things. It is my past that created the woman I am today.

Our pasts help define us, but do not have the final word. Who we are today is what matters; what we have created from our pasts and what we’ve decided to give to the world is what matters.