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.
Careful inspection of my comments will reveal that I haven’t said anything about you being white, so… no?
It is honestly hilarious that you are able to maintain this illusion that you are a bastion of credibility but everyone arguing with you is just a big meanie liar-pants.
But hey, if your reputation is that important to you, feel free to dig up your own comments about Islam and repost them here. I’ve got better things to do, like call you a racist ding-dong.
@Pecunium – if anyone is a bigot and a moron, it’s you. As you clearly demonstrated by making up another load of old bullshit about who *I* supposedly do or do not hate / fear etc.
NEWSFLASH: You are NOT a telepath, you have NO idea what I think or feel. Your assumptions are TOTAL BULLSHIT.
Let me overturn another one for you:
I do not agree, by any means with all, or even most MRAs.
Which if you weren’t so incredibly blinded by your assumptions you would have noticed e.g. when I disagreed very strongly with Tom ?Watson? on this very blog.
@Joe
we know that you think citations are pointless and you have the telepath powers to know whether we read them or not. 😉
Uncle Joe: @Pecunium – I stopped reading your patronising post when you started telling me what *I* think and why *I* think it. Your false assumptions are false.
How do you know? You didn’t get to the end. Self limiting access to information is a quick path to irrelevance.
Poor old Joe, the troll with nothing better to do than come here and scream and complain about the straw feminists in his head. I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a douche.
Hey kids, it’s time for another round of Spot That Hypocrisy!
Joe on how Pecunium CAN’T READ HIS MIND, MAAAAAAN:
Joe on how HE TOTALLY SEES RIGHT INTO MY HEAD, MAAAAAAN:
Intuiting motivations: Unfair, sometimes, but only if Joe says so!
P.S. It’s Tom Martin, Joe, and no one is impressed that you disagreed with him. It’s kind of the bare minimum for not being an awful person.
@becausescience –
“*Of course, they’re quick to point to statistics about males being more likely to be victims of homicide, but they leave out the part where the perpetrators were also males. Why is that?”
1) it’s irrelevant
2) it’s victim blaming
3) it’s an effort to minimise the suffering of male victims and stop them getting help, by considering them not as individual human beings, but as members of a “group” of Bad People who don’t “deserve” help. Which “group-think” I’ve already strongly criticised in this thread.
@becausescience and cloudiah – the extensive efforts I’ve made throughout my life to protect myself from violence (remember when I told you I’ve been the victim of violence? On multiple occassions. You were all super quick to gloss over that) and my friends, family and other decent blokes and women too are: none of your damn business.
No, honey. The bullshitter is you, because we can go back and find where you’ve told us how you feel about several different things.
You should have a lie down and take off your tinfoil hat, dear. The boogeywimminzs in your head are acting up.
– Voting — this is an unfair priviledge?
– Right to work, especially in high-paid professions such as lawyer, judge, doctor etc.
Again, this is an unfair priviledge?
– Paid maternity leave
What about it? You want people to be punished for having families?
– legislation against firing women who are on maternity (we have this here in UK)
Well, you really shouldn’t fire women just because they are on maternity leave. It’s not decent. Men get maternity leave too in some parts of the world.
– any and all feminist-run organisations that provide paid work for feminists
Meh, not sure what you mean. That NOW employs women irks you?
– special benefits that only apply to women within healthcare and welfare systems, including and particularly assisted housing
Uh, no. These are one of those ideas you pulled from your ass.
– removal of women’s previous marriage obligations, while retaining men’s obligations
OK, this one is uncomfortable. Previous marriage obligations for women meant they had to obey. That’s sexist and icky. But women still benefit from men’s obligations? Unclear what you mean. Are you talking about a man sharing his income with his wife? Not everyone does this…and besides, you don’t seem to like the idea of women in high-powered careers. Are you in favor of women earning a living or not?
– priveleged position / consideration for women in front of divorce courts
Oh christ. You’re such an MRA.
– hire quotas favouring women over men, especially in academia / public service
There are no laws laws forcing employers to hire more women than men.
– domination of the education system by feminist academics and women teachers
Men aren’t blocked from the educational system. There are slightly more female profs here in the U.S., but then again, they’re often paid less.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Pyramid-Problem/126614/
Joe, honey, stop yelling. We can hear you just fine without the caps of rage, and it makes you look silly.
It’s funny how this sort of thing is taking a concept that has some validity and then proceeding to use it to shoot yourself in the foot.
I mean – sure, if you define a group arbitrarily based on some far reaching specific, you need to be aware of outliers. All right, yeah I can see that. Comparing my income and all of George Soros would end badly, with me coming out on top, since minimalism is the better thing (how not to argue, part 10202)
Taking the average of our combined incomes would also skewer significant results, which is why median analysis works better. So far, so good. “Watch your outliers, sometimes they twist the crux of your data”.
… Which then instantly becomes: “And working class blokes, poor as they be, don’t understand feminism because it says they’re all evil and out to get ’em, and men are bad, and apex fallacy because George Soros makes more money than Steve down the street”.
… No, that’s not how that works. Being aware that a significant weighted outlier can twist your data does not render the crux of your data useless, it means you take care of that by making sure the works still… work. If a significant number of men hold high power positions, compared to the significant number of women in equivalent positions, you check if that’s a pattern that holds (it is). CEO totals, for instance. Income over X millions. If it is, then you try to figure out why. If a significant number of men makes more than women, you check if that’s true for random groups of men and women as well (it is), and you try to figure out why.
It’s not rocket surgery. Or brain science. Or… those four words?
When someone says “Over time, in general, it seems men tend to form groups that with favoritism towards other men, and our traditional view of things led us into situations where concentrations of power beget other concentrations of power”, you can’t counter that with “Apex Fallacy! Some men also make no money!”
Everyone understands that. Everyone *gets* that. In the sad, dreary work of statistics, ten thousand blue collar workers mean nothing. Million is a statistic, that Stalin quote. No one believes that the homeless guy on the street is really oppressing the Queen of England – that Prometheus Rising quote – because its understood that outliers, on bothends are important. The Apex fallacy isn’t *just* the Apex Fallacy – it’s specifically a fallacy because it doesn’t realize that it really should be “Outlier Fallacy: Making judgement of the median situation of groups based on the accomplishments of significant outliers”
Hey, let’s get funky:
@An Inconventient Truth:
That Huffington Post article was atrocious. Let’s stop Feminism because one woman has decided she wanted to try dating someone else than she normally dates. Her personal desires somehow mean that the activities of all women, everywhere, should be curtailed. Indeed!
Someone just… punch me and make me realize I’m still engaged in reality? Please?
I think I just accidentally snorted blood all over my keyboard as parts of my brain gave up, withering into incomprehension. But… It’s okay, I have a point here, and even if I can feel my soul dying, it’s a point I’m going to make. Just… if the end of this is just one long string of s’s, could someone call the paramedics and have them check up on me?
—
Okay, so Apex Fallacy and … whatever the fnord that was. Clearly, if someone is willing to write that their boyfriends tend to be X and Y but right now they’re happier with Z and also, have you noticed, you don’t have to lie all the time if you don’t want to stick around with people, and sometimes I just want to have no input and no decision making agency and, ha ha ha, being a woman means being passive, then clearly there’s something important we can glean from this:
Namely, that the activities and proclivities of one person does not a trend make. And, in our world, large as it is, the activities and proclivities of a million people does not a trend make. A movement, maybe, and an ideology, sure, but a trend and trait based on an attribute so inherent as “Male” or “Female”? No. And why? Because you can always adjust for more differences.
If you look into it, you’ll find that most people in positions of power come from the same sort of backgrounds, know the same sort of people and can be clustered in the same areas of the country – namely the ones with prestigious universities, colleges or important foundations. So, Harvard graduates always run the world, right? No.
You can make guesses and you can control for outliers, but randomization across samples of a large enough type get really, really problematic. So when you go “This one woman proves that all women, everywhere, should abandon Feminism and date Republicans”, you are wrong and drawing too much from a single data point. If you, Random Reader, go “Ah, but these ten guys have no income, so men don’t rule the world”, you are also drawing the wrong inference.
Feminism does not claim that men run the world, entirely. The claim is that, in general, you’ll find more examples of men in positions of power and you’ll find situations where men have more privilege than women, if you compare the two in an otherwise equal setting – on accord of historical precedence. It doesn’t mean men can’t suffer, or can’t have no income, or that the bum on the street is somehow better of than Queen Elizabeth. The two don’t compare.
Fibi does not claim that Emma Johnson is not allowed to want to date this Lou, and it hopes the two of them have many happy encounters together, and that perhaps, in this meeting of quirkily different people, the New York intellectual and the Hot Blooded Republican Male, some amusing Romantic Comedy implications can be drawn! She’s so into Biographies and Proust, He’s So Into Bench-Pressing, ha ha ha, ah, the blood, the blood is back, but it does claim that attempting to prove that 50 % of the human race prefers something based on the witness of one 7th billionth of it is… maybe overstating the case.
Nuances and outliers and medians. The Apex Fallacy cuts both ways, because it’s essentially “Try not to draw too many inferences from little data”, so whenever the MRA use it to go “Hah! Men have it worse, really”, what one should hear is: “Hah, I have chosen to ignore large swathes of the argument!”
—
Anyway, I spent most of the day in the ER watching a friend recover from injuries that’ll be hilarious to talk about in a few years, but really, really sucks now, so this was my way of blowing off pressure and I apologies if it’s just random and… out of touch.
Maybe I should get my own blog?
I think I will.
“Joe, honey, stop yelling. We can hear you just fine without the caps of rage, and it makes you look
silly.sillier.”FTFY 😉
@Gametime – It’s not telepathy to be able to grasp that you forgot I’m mixed race. That you keep on casually LYING by falsely calling me “racist” when we’re not even talking about a race, but a RELIGION – is transparently revealing.
Ohhh, Tom Martin. You’ll have to excuse me for forgetting his name, it’s not like he’s a significant public person. He’s just some random who came up with the daftest lawsuit ever, and then went off about “Whores!” and “Hard chairs!”. If I didn’t know he was a real guy, having seen him on video, I’d think he was a parody.
Also, way to twist my words again. THE POINT I was making was refuting the BULLSHIT assumption that because I disagree with Manboobzers I am the same as all these other people who disagree with you e.g. MRAs. I wasn’t looking for your approval. I disagree with Tom on PRINCIPLE – something you clearly know nothing about.
… How? *headscratch* I just… do not see this… by what stretch of the imagination can someone saying “men often perpetuate violence against men” can you twist that to “men deserve to be beat up because men often perpetuate violence against men”.
Thank you for lying for claiming that poor men have it worse off than poor women. 😉
Because Joe thinks that being victimized by a member of the same sex is tantamount to self-victimization? Joe sounds like the kind of guy who likes to claim that women are only shamed by other women — while, of course, denouncing what he believes is defining men as a group rather than as individuals.
Oh, haha, WE’RE the unprincipled ones. Again, Joe, I invite you to keep fucking that chicken, you disingenuous knob.
Of course not it’s not telepathy – it’s paranoid nonsense, since, again, I said literally not one thing about you being white. Honestly, what makes you think I think you’re white? I’m legitimately confused by your bizarre insistence.
Oh boy, we are hitting critical capslock mass! Who’s bringing the popcorn for this meltdown?
Fibinachi, no apologies needed, not random or OT at all, and I’m sorry about your friend being injured.
Getting your own blog is the coolest idea, as long as you don’t stop posting here!
(Demanding? Moi?)
@Shiraz – there you go with the assumptions straight away. *facepalm*
I never said anything in that list of Feminist successes was fair or unfair. All I said was, they are examples of power and privelege gained through feminism. Which is what feminism is, and does, and what it is successful at, QED.
I have no interest in arguing with you about whether or not these things are “fair”.
I stopped looking for “fair” from society when I was still a little kid.
I present these examples as plain and simple – “what is”.
Feminism gets more power, for feminists. That’s it’s form and function. Efforts to present it as a universal human rights movement that will somehow save everyone (including men! lolz!*) are just bullshit. The same kind of bullshit that has Coca-Cola advertisers trying to convince you (by association) that their product will make you sexy / popular / rich whatever. Just pure propaganda.
*Yes, I laugh out loud every time a feminist says that the solution X problem faced by men is…. more feminism. Seriously, who do they think they’re kidding!?
Screw popcorn, I’m getting me an entree and a glass of wine.
But seriously, telepathy and other psychic activities can be very dangerous. Just watch this scene from Scanners:
Well, of course Joe. All mature people know the solution to any problem faced by men is a nubile slave in every man’s home, and a pair of boots to kick her with.
@Fibinachi – Holy wall of text! tl;dr
@Amused
if only I was old enough to drink, that would be my option here, too.
Though I also have some homework to do, and I guess it’d be kind of hard to do math while drunk.
Joe: Saying something a hundred times does not make it true. Feminism helped get women the vote. Are all women feminists? No? Then feminism helps people who are not feminists.