WidowWadman (love your name, btw, big Sterne fan here)
When you say
"Nobody has said that individual extreme opinions render the whole movement extreme. But that, if first contact with a movement is reading individual extreme opinions it can put off people from wanting to engage with it in the first place."
I know what you mean, I know how you feel. It feels like a completely reasonable to thing to say "well, all I'm saying is that when you read that, for example, penis-in-vagina sex is dangerous to women and women who love it must be brainwashed, you think "Okay, I know how to control for risk and I know what I like: this is just looneytunes. Oh! And now I'm being called names (funfem) because I'm not agreeing with that? Well, how on earth do they expect anyone NOT interested in Feminism to listen to them when someone who identifies as a feminist is put off by that kind of thinking?"
I know how you feel because I've been there. The answer, though, isn't 'be less radical! Attract more people!" it's "More feminism for all! More radical feminism for them as want it!''
One analogy that I could use (because I teach literature) is Shakespeare.
If someone said to me, "I've never seen any Shakespeare. Never read any. I've heard it's good and I think it's important and stuff, but I don't have any idea where to start. Can you show me some?" then I probably wouldn't take them immediately to a back-to-back showing of Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and then Henry V as a chaser. For a start that's over 12 hours of theatre, plus it's rather obscure history in parts, and Henry IV takes a bit to get going.
Instead, I would probably find out if they know the story of Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Macbeth, if they remember any of it from school, and then we might watch a Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet, or the brilliant Patrick Stewart Macbeth (which is basically a horror story, and VERY creepy!) - or good live shows of the same plays. Live is always preferable.
I might invite that person to a reading group, or to come to some lectures with me, but I wouldn't sling them in the deep end, or tell them "Read these plays and then we'll talk" - until they had a feel for the iambic pentameter, until they understood the reasons that Shakespeare uses "Thou" at some points and "You" at others... and I would do that NOT BECAUSE the harder, more obscure stuff somehow deserves to be considered harder and more obscure - in fact, it's amazing and important and deserves to be widely known - but because we live in a time and a place where Shakespeare is not immediately accessible. The language can be off-putting. Some of the ideas feel alien. But familiarity, regular exposure, makes it seem completely transparent language, completely normal ideas.
Where am I going with this? If someone said "Oh, I thought I quite fancied seeing some Shakespeare but I went on the internet and read this article by some professor arguing about the technicalities of his language, or the nature of his staging, or the whys-and-wherefores of his religious imagery - and now I think knowing about Shakespeare is extreme and obscure and radical, and all people who know about Shakespeare are off-putting and how do you expect anyone to want to know about Shakespeare?
I'd say these things:
(1) If everyone was at least a bit familiar with Shakespeare, if there was more Shakespeare around and it was normal to think and talk about Shakespeare, then this 'extreme' Shakespeare wouldn't seem threatening to you. It would just seem like more detailed study of Shakespeare than, perhaps, you're after.
(2) But actually, we live in a culture that is fairly hostile to knowing a lot about Shakespeare. It's seen as snobby or pretentious, it's not easily available, people don't talk about it in pubs, people don't march up and down outside cinemas demanding more Shakespeare films or whatever. So even expressing an interest can be a bold, nerve-wracking thing to do. And then to feel like you're being pushed away by the strangeness of the language and ideas of the 'real' Shakespeare-knowers? Well that's the final straw! Screw this Shakespeare!
(3) the answer to this isn't "Screw this Shakespeare!" it's more Shakespeare. Normalising Shakespeare. Making Shakespeare the normal way of thinking about literature. Making liking Shakespeare something we look for in friends and partners. That way, the direction you take your interest in Shakespeare might go into Henrys 4 and 5, and it might not - but you're not threatened by those who stay up all night arguing about his potential Catholicism.
Radical Feminists can be off-putting because we live in a culture that is hostlie to even the teensyiest, tiniest expression of any kind of feminism. Far more so than the Late-80s and early 90s, when I became interested in it. There has been a wild backlash against the feminist gains of the 70s and 80s, an attempt to keep women subjugated. That's why young women preface their proto-feminist remarks with "I'm not a feminist BUT"
Being any kind of feminist is a BAD thing, at the moment. And "Radical" feminists, feminist who work hard to remove the patriarchal filters that obscure our perception of the world, feminist at the very root of the matter- they have gone past caring that being seen as a feminist is a bad thing. Saying that they should tone it down a bit or they'll put people off is just another way of agreeing that actually, feminism should only exist if the patriarchy says it can.
Given that feminism exists to liberate women from patriarchal oppression, actually feminism that agrees to exist because patriarchy says it can ... is no real kind of feminism at all.
Oh god this is huge. I hope some of it makes sense. I just wanted to engage with what you said because I remember thinking it myself for a while - if only they wouldn't put normal people off! then I worked out: they are not the problem. Our perception of what is 'normal' is the problem.