You'll all recall Chad Hardy's "Men on a Mission" cheesecake calendars, showcasing LDS beefcakes in kitschy poses. The calendar, Hardy says, was designed to alter misconceptions about the church and show they could have a sense of humor about themselves. Apparently not such a sense of humor, though, that Hardy wasn't excommunicated.

Perhaps inevitably, he's launched a distaff version. Here's what Amazon's description has to say:

From the creators of the popular Men on a Mission Calendar comes this hot addition fresh from the oven: Hot Mormon Muffins: A Taste of Motherhood. The debut 2010 edition features twelve beautiful Mormon mothers posing in kitschy vintage pin-up style. Much like the missionary men before them, these sexy moms have dared to step into the spotlight to breakdown stereotypes and extend a hand of friendship beyond religious and social boundaries. Shot in a centerfold format with oversized imagery, the calendar features the ladies' favorite muffin recipes with a portion of the proceeds going to Breast Cancer research.

Hardy adds, "For Mormons, the most holy calling next to missionary work is motherhood...But they're not all the subservient housewives that people think they are." No, some of them are sexy housewives!

Apparently, Mormon muffins are kind of a thing - the Examiner tells us they have a "buttered sugar coating," which does indeed sound delicious. One of the calendar's pinups explains her rationale for posing: "I want [my children] to be open, accepting of other people, know that everybody is not the same and that it's OK to make your own choices." She was upset by Hardy's excommunication, too. "That made me mad, I did not agree with that...The pictures are tasteful, and it's fun. I don't see why people can't have a sense of humor, I just don't think it's a big deal."

Well, that's great, but it's disingenuous to pretend that a female pinup calendar is the same as "Men on a Mission." Let's face it, the strapping, innocent male missionary is a "thing" in pop culture, albeit a goofy one. When you think "Mormon wives," it's not exactly Bunny Yeager that comes to mind. I get it, that's the point. But it's also what makes this dicier. And then you get back to the old burlesque argument: because it's "ironic," is it empowering? Does it really change the way anyone looks at the images? At the end of the day, the whole things starts to swing dangerously close to fetish (making the whole Bettie Page aesthetic particularly apt!) The cheesy, double-entendre-laden "video spots" are especially puzzling. Also, lame.

The calendar's uber-slick website says,

The Mormon mothers who "bare their testimony" on the pages of the Hot Mormon Muffins calendar are women who are comfortable enough in their own beliefs, and independent and brave enough to take a stand for what they believe in regardless of what others may think. There are many stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding women's roles within the Mormon faith. By slightly stepping away from Mormon traditions, these women boldly show the world they can express themselves as being HUMAN along side of their faith - and be proud of who they are, both with a sense of individualism and a sense humor at the same time.

Well, okay. But, here's the thing: there's nothing wrong with wanting to espouse modesty if that's what you believe and are comfortable with. You don't need to do this to show us you're not Big Love. You don't need to mock LDS terminology. In fact, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: women in the the rest of the country don't go around posing for cheesecake calendars to show we're progressive. And yup, it's a double-standard, but in a traditionally male-dominated society, it is different when a guy does it. Am now off to make Mormon muffins. Unironically.

Hot Mormon Muffins Calendar Causes Controversy [Examiner]

Resurrect Your Muffins - Episode 4 [YouTube]
Hot Mormon Muffins'Hot Mormon Muffins' Calendar Pokes Fun At Church Stereotypes With Pinup Photos Of Mormon Moms [NY Daily News]

While the essay covers pretty much every facet of girlhood - and does a good job of capturing a lot of adolescence's pain and rapture, Flanagan's ultimate take on Twilight's appeal is in some ways reductive:

If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about “abstinence,” and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people. ...That the author is a practicing Mormon is a fact every reviewer has mentioned, although none knows what to do with it, and certainly none can relate it to the novel...But the attitude toward female sexuality—and toward the role of marriage and childbearing—expressed in these novels is entirely consistent with the teachings of that church...The series does not deploy these themes didactically or even moralistically. Clearly Meyer was more concerned with questions of romance and supernatural beings than with instructing young readers how to lead their lives. What is interesting is how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book poses, and by the solutions their heroine chooses.

Flanagan is not the first critic to make the explicit link between Edward's self-imposed restraint (he is afraid, to the uninitiated, that if he loses control with Bella he'll be overcome by the temptation to drink her blood, killing her) and the loss of virtue. In several reviews, critics called this out as a transparent bit of moralizing; or a whitewashing of teen sexuality. At the risk of lowering the discourse, sometimes a vampire is just a vampire. To my mind, such simplification — and co-option — does a disservice to the story's elemental appeal. Whatever the author's own inclinations, the book's moral universe is not a didactic one (except in the good/evil way, of course.) Parents advise using birth control; in a later book, characters aren't adverse to abortion. If Meyer had wanted to impose her moral views; she could have — the book was hardly undertaken as a commercial labor. More to the point, were sex actually morally wrong in this universe, there'd be no real tension to the story. That's not to say that the lack of sex isn't a driving force —vampires by definition conflate seduction and death, hence: conflict. Rather, what some critics describe as chaste and Flanagan as essentially puritanical is a return to the basic principle of the page-turner: make them wait for it. I'm passionate about this because I went into the movie without any particular investment, and found myself so swept up in the maelstrom of teen emotion that I fainted. (Yes.) Had this been rooted in a deep-seated puritanism I don't think this would have been the case. More likely, it was the result of a drama that came from something much more fundamental, tension.

Flanagan feels Twilight succeeds because it taps into the innermost wishes of teen girls — for comfort, for love, for reassurance. While we might disagree on the particulars, I won't argue with that: what I will say is that (based on my own humiliating experience) people generally — not just young girls — are moved by simple stories, well-told, and that is not something anyone grows out of. (And it's a pet peeve when teens are treated as a separate species with unfathomable motivations.) Restraints make for good stories (see: the popularity of Jane Austen adaptations) but as society loses them, usually the fictional substitutes we come up with are too lcking in urgency to really command much interest. We've lost a lot of the tricks of good storytelling, and if vampire love is the only way to make people realize that, bring it.

What Girls Want [The Atlantic]
Twilight Is The New Breed of Chick Flick [AP]

Earlier: 7 Vampires Better Than Twilight's Edward Cullen
Twilight At Midnight: Smells Like Teen Spirit