So some Men’s Rightsers are up in arms because the powers that be at Wikipedia just deleted a page devoted to a phony “logical fallacy” invented by a friend of Paul Elam. According to the now-deleted Wikipedia page, “the apex fallacy refers to judging groups primarily by the success or failure at those at the top rungs (the apex, such as the 1%) of society, rather than collective success of a group.”
In other words, it’s a convenient way for MRAs to hand-wave away any evidence that men, collectively, have more power than women. Mention that men hold the overwhelming majority of powerful positions in the worlds of politics and business, and, I don’t know, podiatry, and MRAs will shout “apex fallacy” and do a little victory dance. Rich and powerful dudes don’t count, because of poor and powerless dudes!
On the Wikipedia discussion page devoted to the question of deleting the apex fallacy entry, one Wikipedia editor – who voted “strong delete” – noted that
This is men’s rights activist astroturfing. The guy above [in the discussion] isn’t posting examples of its usage because they’re all on websites showcasing brutal misogyny and hateful ignorance, like A Voice for Men.
He’s got a point. When I did a Google search for the term, my top ten results (which may be different than your top ten results, because that’s how Google works) included posts on The Spearhead; The Men’s Rights subreddit; Genderratic (TyphonBlue’s blog); Emma the Emo’s Emo Musings; and a tweet from the little-followed Twitter account of someone calling himself Astrokid MHRA. In other words, five of the ten results were MRA sites, several of them with explicit links to A Voice for Men. (That “MHRA” is a dead giveaway.)
The top result, meanwhile, linked to a post on the blog of the delightful Stonerwithaboner, who doesn’t consider himself an MRA, as far as I know. But he’s still kind of a shit, and he did recently confess to being (as I suspected) the person who was going around posting comments on manosphere sites as David H. F*cktrelle, Male Feminist Extraordinaire ™.
So, in other words , I think it’s fair to say that the term “apex fallacy” has not yet achieved academic or philosophical respectability just yet.
The deleted Wikipedia page attributes the term “apex fallacy” to Helen Smith, a psychologist who is a longtime friend to A Voice for Men, and dates it to an interview Smith gave to the odious Bernard Chapin in 2008.
But the idea seems to be a simple reworking of a bad idea that’s been floating around in Men’s Rights circles for a lot longer than that.
Back in the 1990s, New Zealand Men’s Rights Activist Peter Zohrab came up with what he called the “Frontman Fallacy,” a notion he spread via the alt.mens-rights newsgroup on Usenet and elsewhere; the term has been widely adopted in Men’s Rights circles since then. As Zohrab defined the term,
the Frontman Fallacy is the mistaken belief that people (men, specifically) who are in positions of authority in democratic systems use their power mainly to benefit the categories of people (the category of “men”, in particular) that they belong to themselves.
So, in other words, if you mention that men hold the overwhelming majority of powerful positions in the worlds of politics, business, and podiatry, MRAs will shout out “frontman fallacy” and do a little victory dance. Rich and powerful dudes don’t count, because of poor and powerless dudes!
Like the extremely similar “apex fallacy,” this idea is rather too silly and facile to count as a real fallacy, but it has proven quite popular with MRAs. Looking through the google search results for “frontman fallacy,” I see links to a wide assortment of MRA sites using the term, including AVFM, Genderratic, Stand Your Ground, Backlash.com, Toysoldier, Mensactivism.org, Pro-Male Anti-Feminist Tech, Fathersmanifesto.net, Mensaid.com, and some others. Like “apex fallacy” it hasn’t made much progress outside the Men’s Rights movement.
What’s interesting about this to me is that this is not the only bad idea that Peter Zohrab has ever had.
Indeed, Zohrab had some extremely bad ideas about Marc Lepine, the woman-hating antifeminist who murdered 14 women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989.
While Zohrab, to my knowledge, never explicitly justified Lepine’s killings, he described the massacre in one notorious internet posting as an “Extremist Protest Against Media Censorship.” Of Lepine himself, he wrote
I bet you don’t know he wasn’t a misogynist – because you have been conned by the media (as usual). In fact, he was a Men’s Rights activist (albeit an extremist one), and one of the things he was protesting about was media censorship.
Zohrab went on to say that it was clear from Lepine’s writings – or at least writing alleged to have been written by him — that
he [was] against Feminists — not against women — he clearly states that he is protesting against various issues which are aspects of Feminist sexism.
Indeed, Zohrab seems not only sympathetic towards Lepine’s “cause” but seems to feel that he was being unfairly misrepresented:
The write-ups on Marc Lepine concentrate on character-assassination. They take things out of context, in the same way that fathers are slandered in the divorce/family court, in order to deprive them of custody or access. …
Marc Lepine was not only not sexist, as the media stated – he was actually fighting sexism!
Lots of MRAs love talking about the “frontman fallacy” or the new and improved “apex fallacy.” They don’t seem much interested in talking about Zohrab himself.
Like it or not, MRAs, this man is one of the leading figures in the emergence of the Men’s Rights movement online, and in the intellectual history of the movement, such as it is.
If I were a bit more paranoid, I might wonder if the emergence of the “apex fallacy” was some sort of an attempt as a rebranding, an attempt to push the “frontman fallacy” and its creator, the old, odd duck Peter Zohrab, with his embarrassingly sympathetic feelings toward a mass murderer of women, down that famous memory hole.
P.S. Don’t read the comments to that MensActivism.org posting, unless you want to get really depressed.
Uncle Joe: It’s a quick and simple way of saying: I refuse to accept that women may be more ill-treated by the world than men are.
@titianblue – if you find that sentence “incoherent” I recommend you go back to school.
It was incoherent; only by having enough of your backstory (or a deep understanding of the ways in which dishonest actors behave in comments sections) was it parsable.
What it was is a shaming tactic. It was an accusation that “someone” was so threatened by “the apex fallacy” that it couldn’t be allowed to survive. One sees the same arguments from Truthers, Birthers and inventors who have figured out the 75mpg carbeurator; and are being kept down by “The Automakers”.
For that to be happening (i.e. “The Apex Fallacy” being “suppressed”) requires an actual conspiracy, rather than an analysis of the thesis on it’s logical merits.
It has none. It’s a dodge, a piece of apologism which let’s a dude who got a raw break in life pretend that men; as a class, don’t have it easier than women, as a class.
As such it’s a tool for institutionalising misogyny, which is why you, and your fellow travellers, like it so much. It lends a veneer of reason to your bigotry, and hate.
@archeothingy – your use of “@theFirstHoe” is clearly an example of juvenile name-calling / ad hominem.
It’s the former, not the latter. That you think it the latter is why you are whining about “The Apex Fallacy”. You clearly don’t know the meaning of the terms of known fallacies. It’s no surprise you would be taken in by neologisms dressed up as if they too were known fallacies.
“katz, I am really hoping your comic includes a trained attack puma because you’re good at drawing animals with personality. Actually you’re just good at drawing, period, and I am jealous.”
Any chance Poutine is the Incredible Hulk of the cat world?
MaudeLL, love your new kitty avatar. 🙂
@Aaliyah –
1 – the stats on male victims of rape are much less reliable than those on women victims, which stats are also unreliable – for lots of reasons. So, I’ll not buy your bald, unsupported assertion of 24 times.
On the strength of what I have read elsewhere, I will acknowledge that as far as I can see women are more likely to be raped than men, but as to exactly what that ratio is, I do not agree that reliable evidence is available.
2 – trying to boil the discussion of murder rates down to only those by intimate partners, is a transparent effort to ignore the ABSOLUTE murder rate, in which men are 3 to 4 times more often the victims. I have come across this time and time again from feminists and it is very telling. It conveys to me that you have zero compassion / interest in what happens to men, even if those men are the victims of murder – because you simply place zero value on men’s lives.
3 – harrasment and threats are unpleasant (I have been the victim of such), but they are not even in the same league as being physically attacked (again, I’ve been a victim of violence), let alone murdered or raped.
And yes, I’m obviously still alive, and no, I have not been raped or sexually assaulted.
(altho’ I was once briefly “fiddled with” by an ear / nose and throat doctor – who in retrospect had absolutely no business touching my genitals, but I was very young, naive and less assertive then.
Oh, and there was the time I repeatedly told that one woman “no”, and she ignored it, but that was very different, from my perspective)
@whoever – I did not “leave out” rape – I acknowledged that it was that exception to the “rule” of who is most often the victim of violent crime (men vs. women).
Not unless you have dick on the brain.
Maybe if you actually read shit around here instead of barging in to drop turds in our conversational punchbowl, you would know this.
@Fade – wait, wait. Let me savour this moment. You just compared poltical constructs / intellectual conceits with…. the force of gravity. Bwahahahahhahahaaa!!
“Geez, women can already vote so thousands of years of systematic oppression are automatically fixed, I don’t know what more these womenfolks want! It’s almost like they want to be regarded as people and not just walking vaginas and stuff”
@Shiraz – I’m not complaining about manboobzers insulting me. I am demonstrating how infantile manboobzers are, by providing them with an opportunity to resort to knee-jerk insults, just because I disagree with them. Which lots of you did.
So when neutral readers come across this thread, they get a real sense of the lack of credibility of manboobzers.
Also, in the vast majority of these murders of men you’re so concerned about, who are the perpetrators?
Uncle Joe: @cloudiah – why on earth would I “read back through the comments”? Absolutely everything any Manboobzer has to say is summed up in the bleat of “Feminists Good! Men Bad!”.
In other words you are just here to have a public wank.
@Lady Stark – sure, your not feminist, riiight. You’re nodding along on a feminist blog surrounded by hard-core feminists and your parrotting feminists catch phrases. If you don’t consider yourself a feminist, you have a shocking lack of self-awareness.
Says the dude who has claimed to not be a part of the MRM.
Any analysis done by any feminist anywhere is automatically suspect, due to obvious selection bias. So, I reject the entire feminist canon, including and especially “Male privelege” as conceived by feminists – it’s bullshit.
Right… this is so logical It’s why one should always reject the explanations of people who study things, and just run with our gut. Expertise is so overrated (and we know the MRM has no selection bias at all, so “The Apex Fallacy”, Misandry, Male Disposability, False Rape, Female Privilege, and all that jazz is TRUE!).
@Shiraz – hahaha. You’re serious?
What? have you had your eyes closed for the last 40 years?
Sorry, but if you haven’t noticed feminists in positions of power (clue: Secretary of State of the USA), feminists orgs funded with taxpayers mopney, feminist inspired laws etc. etc. etc. If all of that has passed you by? Nothing I present you with can possibly enlighten what is clearly your wilful ignorance.
For a dude who lives on a boat in England you are sure obsessed with Feminism in the US. Why don’t you prattle about Maggie, or women in the House of Lords, or as QCs?
Could it be you have been dishonest with us?
As for not being bright? I’m sure it’s clear to any neutral reader who’s smart and who isn’t out of the posters here.
At last you have said something with which I concur.
@gilly – ” then immediately started flinging shit” aaaaand there you go again. Talking with words is not “flinging shit”. You are disqualified from any consideration as holding a meaningful opinion – because you come out with ridiculous stuff like that.
We know all the tricks, we use metaphor, and analogies, and even sarcasm. It must be awful.
Shiraz: Can we see some citations on this? It sounds like you’ve pulled this from your ass.
Thus proving he knows one way to use a colon.
@manboobz- for the record, “MHRA” doesn’t necessarily mean “A Voice for Men”. I’ve seen its increasingly common use at Reddit Men’s Rights as well. The point (even if you disagree) is to emphasize that the “men’s movement” is rallying for basic human rights and not “special rights”, as feminism has been criticized for doing (again, even if you disagree).
Joey, I’m waiting for you to respond to pecunium. Assuming you can understand his post.
@beausescience – “thousands of years of systematic oppression are automatically fixed,”
If you want to “fix” the past – better get to work on a time machine.
Um… Just because people work to reduce IPV, rape and sexual assault, doesn’t mean we don’t care about other things.
I think the problem of overwhelmingly male-on-male violence is men’s to solve. That doesn’t mean I don’t support working on it, just that I think the people most affected by it should lead the way. So Joe, what are you doing to combat male-on-male violence?
“Shiraz: Can we see some citations on this? It sounds like you’ve pulled this from your ass.
Thus proving he knows one way to use a colon.”
*giggle-snort*
As opposed to spending dozens of comments on telling us we’re wrong and misunderstanding what an ad hominem fallacy is, which is obviously a fruitful and rewarding endeavour.
I thought you commented here for the “neutral observers.” Don’t you think they might appreciate some sources? It wouldn’t be very neutral of them to just take what you say at face value.
P.S. In keeping with my personal tradition, I would like to remind you that you are a racist asshole.
1. rape and slut shaming of vulnerable young people
2. habitual downgrading of sex crimes committed against women and transgendered people
3. possession of condoms accepted as evidence of participation in prostitution and used to discount
4. appallingly inadequate sentences given to individuals who are convicted of sex crimes, and for those who enable and excuse rape and incest
5. constant sexual harassment of women guilty of the terrible crime of having an opinion, or a job in a field that has traditionally been almost solely male
6. constant threats of violence and death for the terrible crime of having an opinion, or a job in a field that has traditionally been almost solely male
7. elected officials directing doctors to lie to their patients about critical health care issues
8. employers seeking the power to deny medical treatment to their employees based on their own personal preferences
9. the fact that it is still somehow legal to fire a person for being pregnant
and on, and on, and on, and on…
Oh, yeah. And video games, totally. Evil, evil video games.
P-EMRA, when you’re talking to all of us, you don’t really need to use @David Futrelle. It’s kind of assumed.
Well I see Joey came back but he’s boring, so I kinda just skimmed.
Joey, tell us why you hate citations again
“Seriously, do any of you have any concept how you look to a neutral reader? ”
Except your idea of a neutral reader is a man who hasn’t yet decided whether he thinks women are people or not. He’s also apparently a moron who doesn’t grasp what “Misogyny. I mock it” means, hence has no notion that this blog isn’t about laying out the tenets of feminism for fuckwits like yourself.
“@Fade – wait, wait. Let me savour this moment. You just compared poltical constructs / intellectual conceits with…. the force of gravity. Bwahahahahhahahaaa!!”
You are aware that things being social constructs does not make them any less real? But if you don’t, please give me all your money. It’s a social construct, yet I don’t think you’re going to be flushing it down the toilet.
I guess I should feel glad I missed joe’s racism. Blech. What did he say?
If I’d never been here before and saw “morning height” I’d be confused rather than sure that it was a penis reference. Once again, Joe – not everyone shares your obsessions.
“Right… this is so logical It’s why one should always reject the explanations of people who study things, and just run with our gut. ”
@Pecunium- Reading comprehension. Go back, read TFJ’s post, and try again.
“You are aware that things being social constructs does not make them any less real? But if you don’t, please give me all your money. It’s a social construct, yet I don’t think you’re going to be flushing it down the toilet.
”
I would gladly accept joeys money, I need to get a computer that works
aww, permatwit, keep accusing us of not reading for comprehension. It’s so cute when kids try to imitate adults.