Nicole Arbour is back with another "Dear Fat People" video, and this time, she's calling out the recent and history-making Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue that featured plus-size model Ashley Graham on one of its three covers.
Last year, when Arbour first released "Dear Fat People," which was a six-minute video claiming that fat-shaming was not real, she caused a ton of controversy and her channel was even temporarily shut down. On Saturday, she released "Dear Fat People 2: The Second Helping" and we can only imagine what people are going to have to say about this one.
Arbour gets straight to the point at the beginning of the video by saying, "I have to bring it back because the world is going crazy. A chick with a dick won woman of the year, Barbie had to look like she eats cheeseburgers to make feminists happy, Mike Tyson is a vegan, there's a plus-size model in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and Leonardo DiCaprio might actually win an Oscar."
She went on to mainly touch on the Sports Illustrated issue, and even though she never uses Graham's name, it's very obvious that's who she's talking about. "Is she pretty? Totally," Arbour says about the plus-size model in the issue. "But Sports Illustrated swimsuit models are the mecca of physical perfection when it comes to modeling. And she's representing 'real women' and 'natural curves' and a 'natural body' but she's photoshopped to f--k in all her photos...You can feed me a feel-good story about body positivity, but you're photoshopping yourself."
These specific statements are bound to cause enough controversy in themselves, as Graham has already revealed that the photos were not photoshopped. "They did not retouch me," she told Access Hollywood earlier this month. "They did not take out things. They didn't reshape my body in any way, shape or form."
Arbour went on to explain how it's not fair to the other models who work hard to stay in shape to get these major jobs. "All the other models have to be in top shape. She doesn't, or it's discrimination," she says. "If any of the other models showed up looking like her, they'd be fired."
Graham has not yet responded to this video, but when the first one debuted last September, she could not believe what she was watching, especially since she always enjoyed Arbour's videos in the past.
"She is a funny girl but the subject matter is disgusting," Graham told E! News. "I feel like women already have so much that they have to go through in their day-to-day, so why are you going to sit there and tell us you're fat or tell us that we are big boned? I am not an advocate for bulimia, anorexia or obesity, but I am an advocate for women and empowering women and making sure that women around me feel comfortable and confident. That is not something she is about! I really did not like the video at all, but you know what it's doing? It's giving the curvy girls more publicity. It's saying, 'Hey curvy girls you actually are sexy!'"
Graham wasn't the only one who responded to Arbour's first video, as Whitney Thore, the star of "My Big Fat Fabulous Life," and model Chrissy Teigen both publicly commented on the viral video, among several others. "Fat-shaming is a thing; it's a really big thing, no pun intended," Thore said at the time. "It is the really nasty spawn of a larger parent problem called body-shaming, which I'm fairly certain everyone on the planet, especially women, has experienced."
"Yes, Nicole, there is such a thing as fat-shaming," Teigen also said. "And you're doing it right now."
Despite all the backlash, Arbour didn't seem to care, and it clearly didn't stop her from sharing her opinion once again. "We're all trying to be politically correct so that we don't offend anyone," Arbour said in a follow up video entitled "Most Offensive Video," in which she called out the critics of the fat-shaming video. "I don't care if you're offended. If you don't have a sense of humor and you don't understand jokes, I don't give a f-k."
