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Nicole Arbour, a Vlogger and comedian, prompted outrage with her six minute “fat-shaming” video, ‘Dear Fat People’, which criticised overweight people for claiming they are discriminated against.
In the six-minute video, intercut with jokes and quick edits, she calls out the culture around fat acceptance. “Fat-shaming is not a thing. Fat people made that up,” she said in the video. “Are you going to tell the doctor that they’re being ‘mean’ and ‘fat-shaming you’ when they say you have fucking heart disease?”
She told a story of going to the airport and encountering a “TLC-special fat” family that “smelled like sausages,” who get to skip the line and head to the gate in a golf cart because of their mobility issues. She then had to sit next to a member of that family, whom she calls “Jabba the Son.”
And she said she hopes any “fat-shaming” she does will actually motivate people to lose weight. “If we offend you so much that you lose weight, I am OK with that,” she said. “I don’t feel bad for you, because you’re taking your body for granted.”
The video was met with almost immediate outrage, especially in the body-positive community. Whitney Thore, star of TLC’s My Big Fat Fabulous Life, posted a response video calling out Arbour for harshly judging people she doesn’t know, especially since fat-shaming usually just makes people gain more weight. “You can not tell a person’s health, physical or otherwise, just by looking at them,” she said. “Do you know that I’ve recovered from an eating disorder that I suffered from for seven years?”
YouTube star Grace Helbig, who has 2.6 million subscribers, posted a heartfelt response to Arbour’s video. “I was really triggered by that video, unexpectedly,” she said. “I’ve had my own issues with body image in the past, some really dark personal struggles.”
Arbour said that YouTube took down her entire channel and suspended her Google+ profile after the video was reported too many times. Her channel was eventually restored, and the video racked up millions of views on Facebook in the meantime.
https://twitter.com/NicoleArbour/status/640606895389188097
Agencies/Canadajournal
