Anita Creamer: Striking a pose for women of normal size

Consider what it takes to be an honorary hot mom. Tami Bears is 31 and, after having endured four miscarriages, the mother of a 4-year-old girl. She wears a size 8 and weighs 135 pounds.

"And you can quote me on that," says Bears. "If you'd printed that 10 years ago, I would've begged you to say I'm a size 4. I'm not considered calendar or model material in today's way of thinking."

Yet here she is, included as Honorary Nor-Cal Hot Mom in the newly released "L.A. Mom Calendar, Home of the Hottest Mom in L.A."

"Beauty doesn't have a size or age or ethnicity," says Bears.

That was the point of photographer Joel Garcia, who created the calendar project.

Now Tami Bears, a stay-at-home mom from El Dorado Hills who always wanted to be in show business, wants women to know they're fine just as they are.

Even if they weigh a little bit more than Hollywood says they should. And even if they have distinctive features that fall outside the cookie-cutter blandness that makes many young actresses look interchangeable.

Bears hopes that when daughter Lexi grows up, she won't feel the same anxiety that affects so many women now when they compare themselves with prevailing ideas of feminine perfection.

"I tried for years to get acting jobs," says Bears. "I went to tons of casting calls, and I'd always bump into, 'You're not tall enough' and 'You're not thin enough.' That's hard for any woman to hear."

You bet it is.

To the barricades, ladies. Bears and her fellow calendar girls are trying to reclaim a healthy body image for real women.

Even so, there's something vaguely disturbing about these hot mom calendar pictures (which you can find at www.lamomcalendar.com).

Is it a good thing, it must be asked, for regular women – moms ranging in age from 21 to 45 and in size from 2 to 14 – to compete for pinup status? Is the answer to Hollywood's unrealistic and exploitative portrayals of women's bodies really to stake out a separate but equal territory of sexy, bikini-clad images?

Isn't there a time when moms can just be moms, sags and all, and forget about being hot?

And, for heaven's sake, is this calendar yet one more demented sign that there will come a time when everybody (with the possible exception of you and me) poses on the Internet in various states of undress?

None of this, of course, had anything to do with the actual online controversy that erupted over the calendar, which began after Bears, a top vote-getter in polling for hot mom candidates, was disqualified because she's not from Southern California.

She hadn't ever pretended to be, and people voted for her anyway.

"That was a bummer," she says. "The amazing thing about Sacramento is, as soon as word gets out that there's a local person competing in something, people come together. I had people sending me e-mails saying, 'Good luck' and 'You've got my vote.'

"So what happened was, after I was disqualified, people wrote in to bring me back."

Once a hot mom, always a hot mom.

On her page, included at the end of the calendar after all 12 Southern California hot moms, Bears is wearing a teeny white bikini and a smile. The photo was taken by her husband, a law enforcement officer.

She looks like she's in great shape.

She also looks like she's on the verge of shimmying out of her teeny bikini bottom.

It's an image that seems aggressively at odds with her women's-empowerment point of view.

Still, she says: "It's tasteful. It's not something I'd be embarrassed for my daughter to see in 10 or 15 years."

Just wait. As any eye-rolling, disdainful teenage girl can tell you, moms are so rarely hot.

About the writer:

• Anita Creamer's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in Scene. Reach her at (916) 321-1136 or acreamer@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/creamer.