Most people that I speak to are in no position to attend a NAAFA Convention, so isn’t all the effort put into the Convention wasted on the few while the many have to make due with the Website?

William (NAAFA member)

NAAFA is in the contact system for all major media. NAAFA reps do a solid job of responding to media inquiries. The NAAFA convention serves as a meaningful family reunion for a community of people who have been showing up, in some cases, for decades. The NAAFA newsletter appears regularly and is available on the NAAFA website. NAAFA board members are first responders to dozens of requests for help (with insurance, with finding open MRIs, with handling job discrimination, with finding clothing, with regaining child custody, with passing civil rights legislation).

I feel your pain regarding the NAAFA website.

I would also like to suggest that a website may not always be the total (or primary) reality of any one person or project or organization.

I’ve enjoyed all sorts of interactions since I came out as a fat person. Early on, I was what I now call an “armchair size accepter,” as opposed to what I am now, a public, out-n-proud fat rebel. I agree that people can access Body Lib concepts online quickly and that such encounters are revolutionary for each person who is touched by the concept of being at home in one’s own skin. However, based on my own experience, that realization only goes so far when it’s a text-based, screen-based interaction. I’ll never regret dragging and clicking for the revolution. I’ll also never regretted having been the first person (to my knowledge) to wear a thong bikini at a fat pride community pool party. Nothing I’ve ever done online can do what that big splash did for me. Just as meatspace can’t duplicate the ease and access of the internet.

My question was more about why you would write a Dear NAAFA letter, not send it to anyone in NAAFA (okay, the rhetorical device of an open letter, granted), but then wonder why it took three days for anyone to respond.

Carla, you nailed it — rhetorical device. Like I said, I didn’t contact NAAFA directly because I was mostly interested in seeing how people felt about this subject in general. And when I said I was surprised not to see people defending NAAFA earlier, I didn’t mean I was surprised that no one from NAAFA had shown up — just that, among my readers, the response was overwhelmingly negative about NAAFA. I honestly didn’t expect that. (My language was unclear there, though, so I do totally understand why you thought I was saying I expected NAAFA reps to just magically know I’d posted this.)

I absolutely do make sure people know I’m talking about them if it’s important to me that they know. In this case, I figured the nature of the internet might very well lead to NAAFA folks finding me, but I wasn’t counting on it — nor was it important to me whether you did, in the context of why I posted this. Again, open letter.

But I really do appreciate your feedback and your willingness to engage in dialogue about new possibilities. Thanks also for acknowledging the balance in my post. My intention was neither to make enemies nor to dismiss all the excellent work that NAAFA has done.

Oh, and awesome that you’ve figured out the Wal-Mart issue.

Marilyn, I wish our first acquaintance hadn’t gone like this, too. I think I can speak for every one of the fat bloggers responding here in saying that you are an inspiration and a hero of ours. Alienating you was the last thing on our agenda, I assure you.

And I did know which mulberry bush you were speaking of — I’ve experienced it working with feminist organizations, among other places. My point was, going around and around on things you’ve been over a billion times is just the shitty part of being a progressive. You need new people all the time, and every new person needs education. It’s exhausting, and I know you’ve been at this long enough to be especially tired of newcomers walking in and picking fights with the old guard, instead of recognizing that we’re all on the same side.

But that’s really not what I was trying to do here. Again, I can understand how I created that perception with my words, but one blog post doesn’t really have enough room for all the nuance required to explain myself fully.

And I think, as you point out, we’re in agreement on a lot more things than we’re in disagreement on — particularly regarding what is and is not devastating. That’s why, as I said earlier, this is only one post out of over 200, and hundreds more to come.

But to you, Peggy, Carla, and anyone else listening, there’s one point I haven’t addressed yet, which I think is important (although I also don’t enjoy saying it, because I respect NAAFA members individually and particularly appreciate the dialogue going on here).

I didn’t pick on NAAFA because it’s an easy target; I picked on NAAFA because it is, in fact, a difficult target. Because we bloggers all appreciate the history of NAAFA and the efforts of some fantastic people who have been associated with it; because it IS the nation’s oldest civil rights org for our movement, we were actually all loath to publicly criticize NAAFA.

E-mails were flying before I posted this, among people who were all pretty much saying, “There’s a big problem here, but how do we acknowledge it without looking like ungrateful pissants?” I decided to go for it and take my ungrateful pissant lumps. And that triggered a cascade of responses, public and private, along the lines of, “I feel the same way, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

And since what I’m focused on here is a PR problem that affects the movement as a whole, that’s really troubling to me. It seems to me that the mainstream media/culture is showing more willingness than ever (not that that’s saying much) to seriously consider the concept of fat acceptance, or at least HAES — the media coverage of Joy Nash and Gina Kolata comes to mind. And the fact that Joy’s video has been watched a million times, the fact that fat-blog readership is growing like crazy, the fact that thin progressive bloggers are saying, “Hey, I never thought about this before, but I see now that it’s a serious civil rights issue” … all that suggests that there are tons of people out there who want to hear this message, and are looking for it on the internet.

When they look, they find that there’s an organized, longstanding group addressing these issues — awesome! Then they find that there’s apparently been no fat acceptance news in years.

Not so awesome.

That was the whole point of this post. NAAFA’s website undermines the message we’re all trying to get out — that there is an active movement, that our rights are being threatened in new ways every day, that we’re being sold a bunch of lies about “health” to market weight loss products and place a fig leaf over outright bigotry. When the country’s oldest civil rights org representing our movement is not providing updated information for people who want to find it, that hurts the movement. And I wanted to know what people intend to do — either from within NAAFA or from without — to address that serious PR problem.

I know the board realizes the website needs work, and you’re on it. That’s fantastic. And the main reason I won’t offer my skills — as I said way upthread — is that I have none, when it comes to web stuff. I use a free, completely idiot-proof blogging service (www.wordpress.com) to publish this. All I do is type. (And many resources like that are out there if NAAFA wants to make an updated internet presence a priority.)

I understand that no one is ever going to agree on what should be Job One — or Job Last, or how to rank all the jobs in between. Those of us in the fatosphere who are trying to work together already have plenty of internecine disagreements — and believe me, we’re well aware of how ANY non-profit inevitably suffers from that; the question is really how massive of a distraction it becomes. But the problem is, while NAAFA’s trying to juggle a zillion different balls and find agreement among different personalities, and actually get things done, the website is still out there telling the world, “The fat rights movement is disorganized and out of date.” And as I said, that really does affect everyone who’s joining this fight, in any capacity.

Is it devastating? No. But it’s misleading and, more importantly, demoralizing to new fat acceptance activists and allies.

That’s why I focused on that one thing. Is it more important than working to get anti-discrimination legislation passed? HELL no. But so many potential allies don’t know that anti-discrimination legislation is even in the works, because the information is not there at the first place people look. That’s without getting into the fact that there is no way to make a donation to NAAFA online without joining up, no current list of other web resources, or even recent books on the subject. There is nothing up-to-date for journalists who say, “Hmm, what’s this Joy Nash phenomenon about — does it represent something bigger?”

And the thing is, since I posted this, I’ve heard from numerous people — not just those who have political or personal disagreements with the NAAFA board — that people have been saying this stuff, and offering volunteer labor to fix it for YEARS. I have heard from numerous people — some of whom I don’t know; some of whom I know, trust, and esteem — that they have tried to get involved with NAAFA in the past and found themselves rebuffed, excluded, condescended to, and frustrated to no end.

So, despite the fact I’ve got 3 board members here having a respectful and useful discussion with me and inviting me to join up, I’m afraid the best information I have still suggests that NAAFA is simply broken — maybe beyond repair, maybe not.

And I do NOT relish that thought. I do not wish you any ill. I do not want to compete with NAAFA. I do not want to see NAAFA go down. I definitely don’t want to feud with NAAFA, or boost my own profile by taking cheap shots.

But as it stands, I still don’t want to be a member of NAAFA, either. Because my priority (not to mention what my personal skills are best suited to) is harnessing the growing momentum on the internet and getting information out to people who are looking for it. Joining NAAFA seems to be about the least efficient possible path toward that end. And, frankly, I just don’t want my name associated with an organization that, in 2007, can’t get a strong web presence together — even if I have all the respect in the world for its other accomplishments, which I do.

That’s about as clear and honest as I can be on the matter. Again, I mean no disrespect, and I really appreciate you all coming by here to have this conversation. But that’s where I stand. Feel free to e-mail me if you want me to clarify or expand on anything I’ve said.

Can’t say it’ll come down immediately, but will come down.

Just to clarify, Rotund, I am a board member of NAAFA. I speak for myself, not for the whole organization, but I think board members generally agree with me when I say this…

1. We agree with criticisms here.
2. We are trying to fix/improve things exactly in the directions the criticisms here would have us go.
3. We would like your help, but if you’re not interested, that’s fine. We’re glad if you start something else. All efforts toward Body Liberation are needed!
4. We get tired and sad when we say we’re doing what we can with resources available and that things are changing/improving and people continue to criticize and say it’s not enough.

I imagine that it is probably a predictable byproduct of oppression that the resources oppressed people create to liberate ourselves from that oppression are not perfect, that they in fact replicate many of the dynamics that we so desperately desire to be free of, and that we must end up doing a kind of ongoing head-shaking process to see the stuff that’s in our own blind spots.

I don’t really care to spend a lot of my own time and attention trying to figure out which is more devastating to the prospects of ending weight-based oppression, NAAFA’s outdated website/institutional structure or blog-based, public criticisms of the nation’s oldest fat civil rights organization. I don’t actually think that *either* phenomenon is so terribly devastating. I think stomach amputation is devastating. I think that fat children taken from their loving families by the courts is devastating. I think that every fat person who pre-excludes herself or himself from a job or a date or a cute outfit or a good day because they don’t feel they deserve it is devastating.

I wish you all well. I wish I knew you all better. I wish our first acquaintance, in some cases, had been a topic that I could feel good about.

Thank you for schooling me in the currently available technology. One still has to choose to accept an RSS feed, yes? (or subscribe, or whatever the kids are calling it these days) (Again, a joke. I am 37 and it amuses me that overnight I have apparently become a technological dinosaur, even though I document software development for a living.) It is very easy to do that from the blog itself, but not so easy to do when you don’t know it exists. If you live in Toledo, does it really matter that the information you want is available on any street corner in New York? Again, not a lot of tech savvy, not a lot of time.

Google News feeds are indeed new to us. That is how Peggy came across Kate’s blog to begin with. Otherwise, none of this conversation would have happened. It’s not that we don’t want to know, it’s that for the most part, we don’t know it’s there. No matter how many times you tell grandma to set her VCR, it will keep blinking 12:00 until someone who knows how to work VCRs helps.

And to respond to you, Jess, no, we are not. Because (other) political blogs have not posted a letter directly addressed to us opening up a conversation about how we need to fix our struggling organization. And because it’s a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper!) to volunteer to help NAAFA than to run for office, I don’t feel that the requests are analogous.

A few years ago, I directed some of the same criticisms that you have to the Board. I got a similar response to the ones that some of you have. When told to “help fix it or shut up”, I chose to help fix it. Within a very short time, I was a Board member, and was one of the members who voted to pass the anti-feederism policy. That was change. I helped. I couldn’t keep up the time committment being on the Board requires (I am laughing at myself right now), so I switched the direction of my volunteer efforts to the convention, for reasons I addressed above. I made mistakes my first year. I took what I learned from them to make the next year’s better. That’s all I can do, is keep making incremental progress to the best of my ability. It’s not revolutionary, it’s not sexy, but it’s what I can do. The more people we have helping to make incremental change, the better. It’s a huge job, and everyone who is trying to impact public and personal opinion matters, whether they’re doing it on a blog or one-on-one in person.

Letters to various papers’ op-ed columnists are also in order.