The mother of all PR geniuses, Kim Kardashian, posted a photo on Instagram of herself naked, covered only in glitter, to promote the launch of her new highlighters for her KKW Beauty line. One of Kardashian’s arms barely covered her nipples. She used the other to pull on her platinum blonde ponytail while she slightly opened her glossed mouth, as if in mid-moan.

I looked at the picture, filled with body oil and sexual innuendos alike, and I thought to myself, “Damn, she looks good,” and continued to scroll down to the comments section out of pure boredom.

I stopped mid-thumb-swipe when I saw a comment left by a woman that said “Don’t you think about how this is going to affect your son one day? He’s going to be ridiculed because of your promiscuous behavior for the rest of his life.” Of course, she ended it with, “#karTRASHians.”

In short, she was accusing Kardashian of shitting on the sanctity of motherhood via her bare ass and tits.

This was only one of a barrage of comments from other Instagram users, all implying the same thing: As a mother, Kardashian should not flaunt her sexuality because it will affect her kids’ emotional development and ruin their billion-dollar inheritance lives forever.

I could not believe the uproar from the motherhood-morality police on Instagram. For one, Kardashian’s ass had been inundating my vision via Instagram, magazines and TV for the past decade. Had this really been the first time these people were seeing her naked body? And why was this overt expression of her sexuality being directly correlated with her abilities as a mother?

In a culture proliferated with MILFs, it seems that society’s acceptance of them only extends as long as a teenage boy’s arm as he reaches for his pre-masturbation bottle of lotion. Had we forgotten the multi-faceted identities of mothers as lovers, career women or (gasp) sexual beings? Why were motherhood and sexuality considered to be mutually exclusive?

In Sharon Hays’ book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood,” she analyzes several child-rearing manuals that perpetuate the ideals of “intensive mothering” — a form of parenting in which the mother must “stand in opposition to the self-interested, competitive pursuit of personal gain” and serve as the sole primary caretaker of their child.

By intensive mothering standards, Kardashian was doing a terrible job.

Whether it be her shameless self-promotion on social media, magazine spreads, reality show or all-around persona as this generation’s sex symbol, Kardashian was still in the pursuit of making the Kardashian brand the most lucrative brand in the world — and her tits and ass were going to help her do it. As a result of her self-interest, her kids were going to suffer in their private schools and mansions around the world for the rest of their lives.

So what does women’s expression of their sexuality have to do with their parenting? Absolutely nothing.

After I gave birth to my son, I found myself saturated with articles on “how to get your post-baby body back” or “how to feel sexy after baby,” all of them pressuring mothers to reclaim their bodies and their sexuality after the daunting experience of childbirth. As seen with the backlash Kardashian received, the problem wasn’t with her getting her sexy back after having babies; it was with her openly embracing it.

In other words, our bodies as mothers can be used to birth babies or to be the objects of sexual arousal for men, but never are they our own.

Society as a whole needs to stop regulating the bodies of mothers and our perception of them and simply let them live. Some mothers hide their sexuality and some mothers show it, and neither is indicative of their abilities as a parent.

After all, the only correlation between sex and motherhood is that motherhood begins with sex. Just ask Kim K.

“Off the Beat” columns are written by Daily Cal staff members until the spring semester’s regular opinion writers have been selected. Contact the opinion desk at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @dailycalopinion.