Kendra Wilkinson launched her entertainment industry career as a body-painted teen who caught the attention of Hugh Hefner. 

But now that she's a 26-year-old wife to NFL player Hank Baskett and mom to son Hank IV, the former Playboy pinup says she wants to be an empowering role model to women.

That's why Wilkinson says she hopped from her longtime network home E! to WE TV to star in the new docu-soap “Kendra on Top."

“WE TV represents women and empowering women, and I am so very happy to be a part of all that because I feel like it is time. I'm a woman now and it is time to break out of that shell and have fun and show everyone that it is okay to be a working mom and wife and still step out and be hot,” she told FOX411's Pop Tarts column at last week's Us Weekly Hot in Hollywood party. “It's like the book '50 Shades of Grey,' I think my show has a similar theme to that."

When pressed on the similarities between her show and the best-selling erotic fiction, Wilkinson hedged.

“To be honest, I have not read it. But I get the idea of it,” she explained. “This is what WE tv says to me: ''50 Shades of Grey' that's what we are to women, we are empowering.' And I said, ‘Cool, me too!”

Cool.

And even though we have already watched the buxom blonde's ups and downs through five seasons of “Girls Next Door,” four seasons of her spin-off show “Kendra,” and one season of “Dancing with the Stars,” Wilkinson insists “Kendra on Top” will portray the real Kendra.

“This season we're stepping it up. More characters on the show, and I have a lot more friends involved,” Wilkinson continued. “We're settled in L.A. now; we're not all over the country, so we are sharing who Kendra truly is now. I do have sides people have never seen before.”

For someone who has posed naked in Playboy a few dozen times, that would indeed be surprising.

Danielle Jones-Wesley contributed to this report