Image courtesy of www.youtube.com
I was scrolling through YouTube on a Sunday morning when I saw a video uploaded by a YouTuber named Grace Helbig. The video was an emotional response about another video she had seen by YouTuber Nicole Arbour entitled “Dear Fat People”.
The video was this so-called “comedian” trashing overweight people, saying that they should “just stop being fat.” The video has now gained 30,000,000 views and they aren’t slowing down. After watching it, I just felt really mad. I was mad that someone who labels herself as a comedian could be so mean and speak about weight in such an offensive way. In her video she says that fat shaming is a thing that fat people made up, that plus-sized really means plus-heart disease and that fat people have a constant aroma of sausages.
Arbour has a YouTube audience of 220,000 and a Facebook fan-base of 700,000. In the past month she has made three viral videos, each with more than 15,000,000 views. Clearly she knows what she is doing and she has comedic talent. But when you bully someone because of their weight, that’s not comedy.
The majority of Arbour’s viewers are teenage girls and according to washington.edu, 78 percent of teenage girls have body image issues. She tells these girls that if they are so offended by what she is saying that they decide to lose weight, that’s fine with her. She doesn’t even consider the idea that these cruel words can lead to anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. The fact that losing weight too fast is ridiculously dangerous doesn’t even cross her mind.
Her video continues to an anecdote about a “fat family” at the airport. This story then leads to her complaining about a fat kid she had to sit next to on the plane. There is a definite difference between promoting healthy living and bullying an overweight child.
The idea that she can sit there, humiliating a child and saying that his weight bothers her, is horrific. Then, she justifies it by saying that she’s just being that “ride-or-die friend” that will tell you the truth that everyone else is too scared to say.
Her tweets suggest that she is not at all apologetic to the people she has offended, she in fact commented on the amount of publicity she was getting, bragging about the fact that she got 30,000 subscribers over the weekend the video was uploaded. It seems as if she doesn’t care about the people she offended and it’s really about gaining publicity for the album she conveniently dropped the day after this video.