Entrepreneur and mother-of-three Maria Kang has become the latest meal for a mass media ever hungry for an excuse to sweeten pages with cheesecake. Kang’s angle: new moms can look like swimsuit models if they sweat and ease up on the munchies.
These days with websites in ferocious competition to grab readers with ADD it doesn’t take much to go viral. Kang did it just by Facebook posting a picture of herself in hot-pink sports bra and boy briefs next to her brood of three baby boys with the big caption, “What’s your excuse?”. Since the post went up last year, it has garnered a quarter million likes and an abundance of snipes by women accusing her of fat-baiting and showing off.
That was enough of an excuse for the likes of Huffington Post, Yahoo Shine and dozens of other sites to feature Kang as agent provocateur du jour.
Kang, 32, isn’t entirely an accidental virus or an innocent victim of a voracious mass media. She has her own website called mariakang.com which is now having trouble handling the traffic since her post went viral. It keeps throwing up error messages suggesting the server is way too overburdened to send pages.
Kang is very much into self-promotion, and knows its value in her home-based business activities of running two elderly-care facilities, a fitness non-profit and freelance writing. Her commitment to fitness is longstanding and sincere. She said she had actually posted the picture to inspire new moms, not to antagonize the ones who let themselves go postpartum. Her Facebook page even credits herself as “Creators of the Belly Ball.”
Regardless of her original motivation, now that she’s become the poster girl for bikini-fit moms who scorn their more sedentary peers, Kang isn’t above adding fat to the fire. In her recent rejoinder to her critics suggests she writes, “I’m sorry you took an image and resonated with it in such a negative way…
“I won’t even mention how I didn’t give into cravings for ice cream, french fries or chocolate while pregnant or use my growing belly as an excuse to be inactive.
“What I WILL say is this. What you interpret is not MY fault. It’s Yours. The first step in owning your life, your body and your destiny is to OWN the thoughts that come out of your own head.”
It will be interesting to see whether Kang manages to leverage her 15 minutes of fame to become a more permanent mass-media fixture.
