As you’re probably aware, Ice-T’s wife Coco Austin is no stranger to butt pics. Her derriere is … how should we put this? Large and in charge. She gets shamed for it sometimes, but she always knows how to clap back.
This time, though, she’s taking some heavy criticism for talking about her butt.
Because Coco Austin is giving herself credit for making big butts “trendy” and it is not going over well.
On Sunday, Coco Austin posted to Instagram:
“I would like to shed light to almost 21 years of modeling ..”
Sometimes, when you’re writing a long post to Instagram, you might come across as a non-native speaker. That can happen to anybody who’s writing quickly.
“I don’t post much about it & new followers don’t even know I had a career in modeling they just see a wife, mother, and someone that was on reality tv but just like every actor, singer, rapper, entertainer I’m proud of what I’ve done.”
We really do first and foremost think of her as a mom and reality star (though we’ve very aware of her modeling history).
“I feel people should know it wasn’t easy..I helped pave the way for thick girls during the skinny genre (during the Kate Moss days what they call the waif era) to be noticed as beautiful..”
There’s nothing wrong with slender or skinny models, and Coco isn’t suggesting that there is. There is something wrong with portraying only one body type as attractive.
“This was back before social media when magazines were popping, back before KimK, Nicki Minaj..( I mention them because young people see pop culture as the history makers but they need to know it started somewhere before them, this was also back before the plastic surgery craze.”
Well … plastic surgery was still very much a thing. The procedures favored were just different.
Coco gives a shoutout to a number of curvy trendsetters.
“During my time it was pretty much Jlo that was making waves with the derriere phenomenon and Cindy Margolos was a popular bikini model and Buffie the Body was a popular urban model and of course I need to give props to Anna Nicole Smith for also seeing this vision..”
She summarizes what it was like, working with her body type as a model:
“To have booty it was considered to be fat in the modeling world.”
Coco believes that she had an impact:
“But I helped changed the minds of what booty was.”
“Today its a normal thing to see all different shapes & sizes, no one even thinks about it anymore.”
While curvy bodies are becoming more normalized, one need look no further than the comments section of … almost anything … to see that our culture has a long way to go before people really stop giving a second thought to different body shapes and sizes.
But she’s right in that larger butts are totally accepted without question, and often even preferred, in certain roles today when they would have stood out in decades past.
And Coco believes that she was part of that change.
“I helped history in someway.I don’t want to toss it aside like it was nothing.I’d like to think some of my modeling was meaningful.”
In other words, modeling wasn’t just something that she did until she met her husband. It was a real career and she was part of that world.
“Thank you for all years of support .Power to the booty and strong healthy women!”
It’s a nice message, but she got criticism on two fronts. One was accusations that her body only comes from plastic surgery. The other, well, on racial grounds.
One commenter wrote: “Sis, you paved the way for white women to get plastic surgery. But as for the minorities Melyssa Ford, J.Lo, etc. they paved the way for REAL thick women. Let’s get that straight. Stop trying to take the shine away from MLK Day #next.”
Another wrote: “You could’ve just posted your thirst trap…no need for a fake history book as a caption.”
And another wrote: “Stop trying take credit for things that y’all never had until injections . My race women was born with curves y’all was the ones who had bulimia.”
Coco Austin has addressed backlash before, and now she’s doing it again:
“Update to post!!! This was posted Sunday 1/14 & ALL comments were positive until race was brought up today.”
Race and context are both important. As someone whose immediate family isn’t white, we hope that Coco understands that.
“Let me remind you 20 years ago there were not a lot of white girls w/ thick bodies in the modeling game. They didn’t consider my body type as the standard therefore It was harder to work in the industry.”
So she’s sort of doubling down on having had an impact … but at the same time, trying to clarify that she’s not trying to take credit for black women.
“I was one of the 1st white models to break the mold & go mainstream with my body type and to let people know its OK to be curvy in the modeling world.”
It sounds like she wishes that her first post had made that clearer.
“Today curvy is the norm but when I first started out it wasn’t. Yesterday I felt I explained this thoroughly but I see some of you needed more details”
Disagree with Coco’s claiming her place in modeling history if you like, but we think that she deserves credit for actually addressing controversies and fan comments rather than ignoring everything that isn’t praise.
