Ashley Graham: 'Please stop calling me pretty for a big girl'
Ashley Graham wants people to stop with the backhanded compliments.
"Please stop calling me pretty for a big girl," the 33-year-old model said on TikTok to her more than 2 million followers. "I’m pretty period, thank you — and I’m not an SAT question, I didn’t ask you." She captioned the post, "do i make myself clear??"
Fans took to the comments to praise the body-positive model for standing up for not only herself, but for plus-sized women everywhere who have heard that same phrase.
"She did not stutter," one fan said.
"Yes yes yes, say that louder for the people in the back," a commenter wrote.
"How anyone thinks this will make feel good baffles me. I don't want your opinion. Validation comes from myself and no one else," another person said, which got an agreeing response from Graham.
This is not the first time Graham has called out backward compliments. In 2018, she took to Instagram to call out fans who believed calling her a "real woman" was a good thing after a commenter on a post praised her for having a "real body."
"We are all real women,” she wrote at the time. “I can’t stand it when I read comments that say 'finally, a real woman.' No matter what your size/shape/amount of cellulite — we are in this together."
Graham has also been open about her past struggles with body positivity, which she admitted was not an easy journey.
"We've been taught to say negative things to ourselves—to pinch our fat and be like, 'One day it'll leave.' To say 'Sorry' when someone bumps into us. So I decided to break that cycle," she told Self in 2016. "But it didn't happen overnight. I had to realize that if I didn't really love who I was and if I couldn't appreciate this—my body—as my moneymaker, then I wasn't going to make any money."
Read more from Yahoo Life:
Ashley Graham bares (nearly) all in body-positive new post: 'I love me, not every day, but most'
Ashley Graham bares all in body-positive selfie: 'I love my big strong beautiful body'
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