The Language of Profeminist Men Online: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis

This article examines the language of r/MensLib, a community dedicated to discussing men's issues in a profeminist manner on the content aggregation site Reddit. The language of profeminist men is relatively under-researched compared to that of antifeminist men, and so this article explores the salient topics of r/MensLib, the specific language used within the community and how r/MensLib orient themselves to feminism. The 50 most upvoted posts of all time and their associated comment threads were collected from r/MensLib, totaling a corpus of 925,153 words, and then a keyword analysis was conducted using Sketch Engine. The study found that r/MensLib explicitly support a range of LGBTQ+ identities, critique socially constructed gender roles, and discuss how they orient to feminism and a variety of other topics, such as the manosphere, sexual violence, abortion, body shaming, and pornography.