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.
Is this going to be some “hand that rocks the cradle” shit?
Who needs logic when you have a conspiracy theory?
Want to explain how men own something like 95% of the world’s land holdings while women do the vast majority of agricultural work?
Want to explain why so many countries still have laws that make women essentially male property?
You don’t seriously think “power” just means “the elite/corporations who run a country,” do you?
Nice line in internalised misogyny you’ve got going there. Not original, though, so no points.
Want to explain why all this political representation by noble dudes has women just in the US still fighting for the right to bodily autonomy?
Blacks in the Jim Crow South in fact had far more political representation and that’s easily shown in multiple ways. The very fact that white people made so many laws to control them just shows how powerful they were!
What is this, like, 5 necro’ed threads this week? Is it something in the ether?
If all the power in society is held by just a tiny minority, then surely men won’t mind if all the people in power are women, am I right?
I know, right? It’s the night of the living dead threads!
Living Dead Threads – Fashion for the Urban Zombie
@ auggziliary
The leap of faith arises from taking this assumption and concluding that the average man has more power than the average woman.
@ toujoursgai
no
@ Cassandra
Speak for yourself.
@kittehserf
Your first two questions move the scope outside of western democracies leading you to another leap of faith – namely that women have less power in some country somewhere and therefore they have less in the US.
I don’t. All the more reason to doubt the claim that women as a group have more power simply because more men are in politics. For all we know those “powerful” men could be doing what their wives are telling them.
Thanks for pointing that out.
What do you mean by that?
Probably because that isn’t a male vs female struggle. If it was, women would win every time alone because they have the voting majority.
@ claudiah
Stop using “black people” as a buzzword to make a case for your conspiracy theory. You can’t anyway.
@ LBT
So long as the average man/woman have equal political representation, there’s no reason to care what the genitalia of the politicians is. Unless you’re a sexist of course.
@Karin Sarr
You are pitching some low-grade bull-shit there. No need to thank me for pointing that out.
Wow, eye-rollingly stupid basic misogynist crap from the latest troll. Yawn. Go read some 101 sites, troll. You know jack shit about anything, it seems.
Oh, and the point of commenting about women’s lack of power world-wide is that not all the world is the US, or western democracies, believe it or not.
I think it’s the change in the weather in the northern hemisphere. Instead of being outside in the sunny weather harassing people, they’ve come inside to their computors to harass people.
@ kittehserf
I’ll gladly respond to arguments or questions that challenge my understanding of the subject matter. But just trading insults with no substance is pointless.
@ titianblue
What are you saying? That I came here to harass? Or are you talking about somebody else?
@karin, if you’d shown any understanding of the subject matter or responded to any of our previous comments in something approaching good faith, someone might be bothered to do more than point and laugh at you.
*Points and laughs – hahahahah*
@ titianblue
Well by all means show me where I’m wrong. Just saying “you don’t get it” is not a refutation even if it were true.
I came here to comment on the blogpost. Why should I have to read and respond to 700 comments before adding my own?
Nope, not my job to explain why you’re an idiot. Still just pointing and laughing.
Another one who didn’t read the tag line?!
“For all we know those “powerful” men could be doing what their wives are telling them.”
Your conspiracy theory is just like the New World Order, but with EVEN LESS evidence! Congratulations!
Sarr: It’s quite real. The flaw lies in concluding that men as a group have more power than women based on the premise that there are more men among the tiny minority that has most of the power.
The fallacy lies in thinking that the apex of power is the be all and end all of it.
I mean, look at slavery*, Everywhere it exists/has existed the slaves outnumber the masters, right? So the slaves have all the power? Right?
No.
Why not? Because the system is built in such a way as to keep the majority from exercising the theoretical power it has. Same is true for men and women.
Women in fact have far more political representation and that’s easily shown in multiple ways.
Go ahead, show me.
*not just in the US, but everywhere. Look at Rome, or Greece. Look at the slave in all but name which were ther Serfs in Russia, or the ideas of indentured servitude which were extent in Europe to the modern age.
By that standard even the suffragettes were needless — women already could vote, since they could make their husbands vote for the candidate they chose.
No, really. By this logic Victorian women had more power than men.
My head hurts.
Sarr: The leap of faith arises from taking this assumption and concluding that the average man has more power than the average woman.
I’d say the leap of faith lies in assuming men are somehow disadvantaged, when the observable metrics shows otherwise.
Your first two questions move the scope outside of western democracies leading you to another leap of faith – namely that women have less power in some country somewhere and therefore they have less in the US.
Nice try at a combined goalpost moving, and fallacy of composition. Half marks for style, full fail for falsity.
Men, in the US/Britain/EU own most property. Men get paid more for the same work. Men who take a leave of absence are treated less harshly on return. Men who don’t marry aren’t told by society they have failed. No one is writing articles, doing television segments about how women who don’t “settle down and rear children” are hating their lives.
Men in power aren’t abused, by society, for being male. They aren’t abused by their colleagues for taking a stand (Wendy Davies springs to mind, as does Nancy Pelosi).
So far you are 0 for 2.
For all we know those “powerful” men could be doing what their wives are telling them.
That three fallacies in this comment alone. You are positing the unprovable negative.
Probably because that isn’t a male vs female struggle. If it was, women would win every time alone because they have the voting majority.
Whut? This shows your utter, and contemptuous, lack of either honesty, or understanding.
Go back to the analogy to slavery. Now make it more subtle in the exercise of the power collection.
Look at how gerrymandering works. At how laws to limit access to the polling place (the Texas Voter ID law was written, in part, to exclude women of the lower social-economic class from voting; in part because it was meant to be stealthy; the women who were refused had ID, it just wasn’t good enough… why? Because they had married, or divorced, or otherwise changed their name because of their relationship to a man, and so didn’t, “match” their “official” name).
So long as the average man/woman have equal political representation, there’s no reason to care what the genitalia of the politicians is. Unless you’re a sexist of course.
And right now, women don’t have that equal political representation, so they (and those who care for political equality) have a reason to care.
Glad to see you’ve come ’round to the moral line of reasoning.
Sarr: Well by all means show me where I’m wrong. Just saying “you don’t get it” is not a refutation even if it were true.
Says the dude who has done nothing but say, “nunh-unh!, yer RONG!” since he got here.
The Irony is strong in you.
I came here to comment on the blogpost. Why should I have to read and respond to 700 comments before adding my own?
Oh… I don’t know, because it’s all been covered and we might rather be doing other things than let a foolish, misogynistic, undereducated, over-blown, self-valorising, fatuous asshat the chance to crow about leaving a turd in the punchbowl.
I, for example, have a sidebar to be tweaking. And I think pecunium here has a new theme to install? (Let me know if you want help with the migration!)
No, it’s not real. The apex fallacy is based on nothing but a straw man. We don’t actually say that men are privileged purely because there are more men who hold positions of power in society – there are many things we also point at to show that men have gender privilege, such as the relatively low rate of sexual assault against men. Feminists point out the fact that men hold more positions of power than women do simply because that indicates a bias towards men in society. The fact that most men do not have such positions of power doesn’t change the fact that they are more likely do have positions of power as a group than women.