It’s time for another episode of “Who are MRAs, anyway?” If you haven’t been keeping up, check out Part 1 where I presented demographic data on the folks of r/MensRights, and Part 2 where I looked at personality factors. Today I want to explore some of the data I collected directly related to the men’s rights movement itself. In this post you’ll find an analysis of the labels that survey respondents used to identify themselves in relation to gender issues (presented through multiple lenses).

I gave survey participants a list of 9 terms and told them to check all that apply to themselves. The terms were:

Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) Feminist Egalitarian Humanist Anti-Feminist Involuntary Celibate (Incel) Pickup Artist (PUA) Man Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) Pro-Feminist Male Advocate

Although each of these terms has a technical, specific definition, there is some ambiguity in the way people apply them (e.g., one person might believe that a feminist is one who believes in equality between the sexes, while another person may think that feminists are exclusively interested in bettering women’s lot to the detriment of men and children). In light of that, there are only two pairings of self-labels that I deemed were definitely mutually exclusive: Feminist & Anti-Feminist, and Pro-Feminist Male Advocate & Anti-Feminist. I am kind of kicking myself for not checking for overlap between those earlier, but I am happy to report that only one individual in 231 responded this way. That person was removed from the data set, and – although I will not be re-running prior analyses in Parts 1 and 2 (because the influence of this one individual is unlikely to change the findings substantially) – all future analyses will exclude this person.

Now that that’s out of the way, here is the general way the sample was carved up. In descending order of proportion of sample that chose each option:

Egalitarian: 60% MRA: 58.7% Humanist: 44.3% Anti-Feminist: 40.87% MGTOW: 14.78% Pro-Feminist Male Advocate: 5.22% Feminist: 3.48% Incel: 2.17% PUA: 2.17%

Also, 2.61% of the sample did not choose to apply any of the above labels to themselves. Here is the same data represented graphically (proportions displayed on the edge of each pie slice).





You might be thinking, “wait a minute, doesn’t that total to 234.35% of the sample?” – and you’d be correct. It’s important to once again note here that these selections are not mutually exclusive. Participants were instructed to select all that apply, and quite a few (67.39% of the sample) selected more than one option. The median number of labels selected by participants was 2, and the range extended from 0 (again, 2.61% of the sample) to 5 (interestingly also 2.61% of the sample).

A few points stand out from the broad summary-level data of participant self-identification. First, the single-most chosen label was Egalitarian, rather than MRA – although the difference was small. Further, the fact that only about 58.7% of survey respondents identified as MRAs seems to indicate that there is a sizable proportion of people who engage with the content of r/MensRights who do not consider themselves members of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM). These may be people who are simply reticent to don the label, but may also be what I’ll call the “uninitiated” – members of the lay public who have reached the subreddit through various avenues and are unfamiliar with the ideas expressed there. These people could also be very well versed in the issues of the MRM, but choose not to join the movement.

Also of note is the very small proportion of the sample identifying as either Incel or PUA (both comprising 2.17% of the sample, each). The data from this survey, then, seems to indicate that participants on r/MensRights overlap very little with two groups that they are often associated with (and subsequently maligned for their guilt by association). In fact, a greater number of respondents identified as feminists (3.48%) and an even larger proportion as feminist-positive male advocates (5.22%).

The final detail I want to point out from above is the proportion of the sample that identified as Anti-Feminist. The data here show that Anti-Feminists are a minority (albeit a sizable one) among r/MensRights community members.

Returning to a point I made earlier, the consideration that these label choices were not mutually exclusive begs the question of how participants combined them. In today’s post, I am going to look at that question as a function of the number of labels each participant selected.

1. Single-label participants.

First, I think it would be useful to look at participants who did not combine labels. Here is a table presenting information about participants who chose just one label.







This is pretty self-explanatory. The only thing I want to highlight is that just over 1 in 10 survey respondents identified themselves as Egalitarian and nothing else. That is the single-largest group of survey respondents when they are divided according to their ID selections. Also, more participants chose just one label than any other specific number of labels.

2. Two-label participants.

Moving on, let’s turn to participants that selected 2 (22.17% of the sample) or . Here is a table presenting information about the frequency with which participants selected specific combinations of self-applied labels.

As with participants who chose only one label, Egalitarian, MRA, Humanist, and Anti-Feminist were far and away the most-frequently-selected options. However, a higher proportion of these participants chose MRA than Egalitarian. Within the group of people who selected two labels, the five most frequent combinations are as follows:

Egalitarian & Humanist (5.22% of the total survey sample) Anti-Feminist & MRA (3.91%) Egalitarian & MRA (3.48%) Humanist & MRA (3.04%) MGTOW & MRA (1.74%)

Beyond these top five, only 6 ID combinations were selected (so, in total, 11 of 32 possible combinations appeared in the data), featuring such individuals as Egalitarian Anti-Feminists, Egalitarian Pro-Feminist Male Advocates, and MGTOW Incels.

3. Three-label participants.

Interestingly, a slightly larger group of participants chose 3 labels than 2 (26.09% of the sample vs. 22.17%). Here is a figure showing the ways that those participants combined their selected IDs.

For these participants, we see the same four single-most frequent labels. As with participants who selected two labels, MRA was again chosen more often than Egalitarian. An interesting difference here is that Anti-Feminist was chosen more often than Humanist among these participants, whereas the two were chosen roughly equally within single-label participants and Humanist was considerably more common among two-label participants.

Out of 84 possible combinations of three labels, only 16 appear in these data. As you might expect, many of the combinations were chosen by very small numbers of people. However, some combinations appeared more often than others in the data, and several of them were sizable. The top five most frequent combinations of three labels were:

Egalitarian, Anti-Feminist, & MRA (6.52% of total study sample) Egalitarian, Humanist, & MRA (6.09%) Egalitarian, Humanist, & Anti-Feminist (2.61%) A tie between Humanist, Anti-Feminist, & MRA and Anti-Feminist, MGTOW, & MRA (2.17% each) Technically 6th place – Egalitarian, MGTOW, & MRA (1.74%)

From the less-frequent ID combinations, you can see there are some fairly interesting individuals, from Egalitarian, Pro-Feminist, MGTOW (MGTOWs? MsGTOW? How does one denote the plural vs. singular of the acronym?) to MRA, MGTOW, PUAs.

4. Four-label participants.

With four labels, things get fairly complicated. I could not think of a good way to represent these data in tabular format so that all permutations of label combinations would be represented, so the table below contains only those combinations that appeared within the data.

The ID labels 1-4 don’t hold any particular significance. I just chose to organize them in such a way that would allow me to group the data as I saw fit. From the data here, you can see that about 16.52% of survey respondents self-identified with four labels. Of participants who selected four labels, 92.11% of them identified as MRAs. More than half of them identified as Egalitarian, Humanist, Anti-Feminist MRAs (and just shy of 10% of the entire sample identified as this group). The next two most common label selections were for Egalitarian, MGTOW MRAs, differing only in their fourth selection of either Humanist or Anti-Feminist. Those who did not select MRA as one of their IDs (7.89% of four-label participants) all chose the Egalitarian, Humanist, and Anti-Feminist labels, but differed in whether they identified as MGTOW or Incel.

5. Five-label participants.

Participants who selected five labels showed minimal variation in their selections. This is surprising on one level because the total number of possible ID combinations, but is more understandable in light of the relatively small number of people who chose this many IDs (2.61% of the entire sample). Because of the low variation I will just describe the data rather than include a table.

All of these participants identified as Egalitarian, Humanist MRAs. From there, they diverged with respect to their positions on feminism: 33% identified as Feminists (and all who identified as Feminist identified as Pro-Feminist Male Advocates), while 66% identified as Anti-Feminists. Anti-feminists split evenly (50/50) between identifying as MGTOW or PUA.

To put it more clearly, 33% of five-label participants (0.87% of the total sample) identified as each of the following combinations of labels:

MRA / Egalitarian / Humanist / Anti-Feminist / MGTOW

MRA / Egalitarian / Humanist / Anti-Feminist / PUA

MRA / Egalitarian / Humanist / Feminist / Pro-Feminist Male Advocate

6. Overall most common ID selection combinations.

So, what are the most common ways in which community members of r/MensRights see and identify themselves? Here are the top ten, which together account for about 61.74% of the entire survey sample. Percentages reflect proportion of the total sample that identifies as exactly the stated combination (i.e., the Egalitarian entry reflects people who identified solely Egalitarian, excluding those who identified as Egalitarian and something else).

Egalitarian (11.3%) Egalitarian, Humanist, Anti-Feminist, & MRA (9.13%) MRA (6.96%) Egalitarian, Anti-Feminist, & MRA (6.52%) Egalitarian, Humanist, & MRA (6.09%) Egalitarian & Humanist (5.22%) Humanist (4.78%) Anti-Feminist (4.35%) Anti-Feminist & MRA (3.91%) Egalitarian & MRA (3.48%)

That’s it for this post. I hope that provided some interesting insight into the community of r/MensRights. Primarily, I hope that this post can help correct some affiliations commonly misattributed to the people of the MRM – namely, frequent associations (implied or explicit) between them and groups such as Incels and PUAs.

In the future, I am thinking of looking at these same data through a different lens – looking at percentages of people from specific groups who identify with other labels. I think that could provide insight into nested questions, for example:

What percentage of MRAs identify as Egalitarian?

What percentage of MRAs identify as Anti-Feminist?

What percentage of MRAS who identify as Egalitarian also identify as Anti-Feminist?

What percentage of MRAs who identify as Anti-Feminist also identify as Egalitarian?

There may be interesting patterns that arise when looking at the data this way. For instance, it may be the case that every MRA who identifies as Anti-Feminist also identifies as Egalitarian, while perhaps only 20% of MRAs who identify as Egalitarian identify as Anti-Feminist.

Does that kind of analysis interest you? Please leave me a comment, email me through my contact page, or get in touch with me through Reddit and/or Twitter letting me know. And as always, please let me know if you have an idea for some sort of analysis you’d be curious to see, or if you think there is something about what I’ve presented in this post that I got wrong. Thanks for reading.