While most brands of feminism aim to achieve gender equality by providing women with agency, freedom, and the ability to choose, the brand outlined by Mina Loy in "The Feminist Manifesto" is radical, violent, and dangerously totalitarian.
Loy samples a great deal from Marx (including the name of her essay.) Some of this is good: she calls for the radical and complete abolition of (gender) inequality, the questioning of existing social conceptions of "virtue," and the dissolution of gender--in Marx's term class--distinctions ("ample interpenetration of the male and female temeraments" (924 in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry)). Some of this, however, is bad; the means by which she calls for the equalization of the genders is specifically violent (she believes in the "absolute destruction" of social institutions and denigrates "reform" (922)) and she universalizes oppressive tendencies to all forms of masculinity (as Marx villifies all non-Communists.)
Loy terms feminists a brand of "superior woman," which is dangerously eugenic. She deems non-feminists--or even feminists that don't subscribe to her specific brand of feminism (i.e. radical sex-positive feminism)--unworthy of perpetuating the human race. This constitutes ideological imperialism and totalitarianism, and despite her otherwise progressive aims, this aspect of her argument prevents me from subscribing to the argument as a whole.
I agree with your criticisms on Loy's totalitarian and eugenic ideas. Even though we only have what was considered a draft of the Feminist Manifesto, I believe little would have been changed. Perhaps Loy was intentionally over-the-top and off putting as a way of calling attention to the issue of feminism as a whole. I am reminded of the way in which the Zine publications that we looked at in class work. Certainly the formatting of the manifesto exhibits emotion, specifically anger. Provided all of that, I personally think she was over the top. There is a line that divides a call to action and a dangerous call to arms, and I feel like Loy crossed it.
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