Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls

Jes Baker’s Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living is exactly what it says it is: a direct, funny, and sometimes infuriating guide to inhabiting a fat body in a culture that has dedicated enormous institutional energy to making fat people feel their bodies are problems to be solved. Baker, the blogger behind The Militant Baker, writes with the authority of someone who has done the work — psychological, political, and personal — of building a life on self-acceptance rather than self-improvement.

The book covers the terrain you would expect: diet culture and its harms, the medical establishment’s failures around weight and health, fashion and the fat body, sex and desire and the lies the culture tells about what bodies are desirable. But Baker is not writing a polemic. She is writing a companion — funny, warm, and practically useful in ways that more theoretical approaches to body politics often are not.

What distinguishes the book is Baker’s honest engagement with the difficulty of the project she is advocating. She does not pretend that deciding to love your body in a culture that attacks it is easy, or that the political act of self-acceptance is the same as feeling good on every particular Tuesday. She acknowledges the real costs of fatness in a fatphobic world — discrimination in hiring, medical gaslighting, the daily attrition of contempt — while arguing that the response to those costs cannot be to capitulate to the framework that creates them.

The research is solid — Baker draws on psychological literature around body image, disordered eating, and the health impacts of weight stigma. The voice is conversational and inclusive, written for the reader who is tired of being told their body is a before-picture. The photography and design are bright and celebratory.

A genuinely useful book — useful in the practical sense of changing how readers think about themselves and their lives. Seal Press, committed to feminist publishing, delivers here a book that lives up to their mission.