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.
Damn you, block quotes.
LOL, believe it or not, feminists don’t actually need a bunch of people whose opinion boils down to “It would be great if domestic abuse was legal!” to think critically about their movement.
The nearly non-existent feminist support for Solanas and the widespread MRA support for Lepine aren’t comparable, sorry.
Okay, but my issue is that feminism still has a monopoly on *gender*. Also, other equality movements are often sympathetic to feminism, and not MRAism, because feminists have controlled gender studies for about a century now.
Physicists have a monopoly on physics research, and other scientists are often more sympathetic to them than to me even though I’ve published extensively in the Journal of My Mom’s Basement! So biased.
Yeah, equality movements are sympathetic with other equality movements because they share goals. People in general and members of equality movements in particular are hostile to the MRM because it is fundamentally little more than a loosely coalesced agglomeration of personally aggrieved individuals united by hate and hostility and the justification of violence (in speech and action).
There are individuals and groups out there working on issues that the MRM pays lip service to, like prison conditions and rape, homelessness, social justice, and the domain of family law. The MRM does not do any work or activism in these areas, unless you reclassify stalking and harassment (or misogynistic whining) as “activism.”
“If you done actual work” Seriously? I need more coffee.
“If you had done” is of course what I meant there…
This is all so disgusting. It’s appalling! I really hope that these MRA maggots are few and far between, only linked via the internet, and only then in small amounts, compared to the vastness of the rest of the planet’s populous. These dickholes certainly remind me of religious extremists, doesn’t matter which religion, by the way. Why do these people exist? I guess it’s just cause, ya know, everything is possible. I’m rambling. Weird day. Great job, Manboobz/commentariat. In my mind I choose to believe you are the majority. But then I get a wee bit paranoid and wonder if more fools than ever imagined are actually in league with such madness, but hide it behind smiling, helpful visages. I myself haven’t met any men that talk like this, so I assume they don’t think this way, as well. God, even my dead grandfather, may he rest in peace (Discworld reference), who was a chauvinistic mad men type of fellow didn’t talk like these guys do. These MRA’s, the leaders and their disciples, remind me of an evil cult. And I mean EEEEEVIL.
I have a 10 y/o son, he is fucking awesome, super smart, witty, sensitive and gentle. He doesn’t like confrontation, never hurts animals, and hasn’t grown up with a mom or dad who told him he was nothing, or that he should behave a certain way (like, “man up, baby!”). But knowing that a lot of MRA’s are teens or young adults (are those one in the same?), who spend a lot of time online, it makes me worry he could end up like that. You know, some girl jilts him, and he can’t take it. I need to talk to him about that, someday. Tell him it happens to EVERYONE at least once, even the prettiest girls or the hottest guys. Seems like a lot of these guys hate themselves so much it oozes out of them, and it’s repugnant, so they can’t get a girl… okay, rambling sorry! But you catch my drift. No one I know talks like this about men and women! These people are, to me, really, REALLY lost. And it seems dangerous. It IS dangerous.
It’s good that it does because 1) feminism tends to have much more reliable analyses of gender and 2) “MRAism” tends to be full of shit.
Hey, Bagelsan, where do I send the bill for cleaning the coffee out of my keyboard (and my sinuses)?
I’m reminded of another literary quote, this time from Harlan Ellison, that sums up the mistake our trolls seem universally to make. They commit the common fallacy that just because they have an opinion, it must be worth something. To which (pace Ellison) I reply, “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
Also, “The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.”
That was such an eloquent description of the MRM. Bravo.
When NOW puts Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto on their “Activism” page, come back and we’ll concede your point.
Please tell me I don’t have to go through the trouble of add an “H” to MRA. I’m not doing it. No.
Solanas never identified as a feminist.
This comment on r/mr made me LOL:
Source.
I didn’t click through to GWW’s blog to see how “systematically” she dismantles feminism, since I suspect it’s just GWW’s SOS (same ol’ shit).
Does anyone really “judge groups primarily by the success or failure at those at the top rungs”? “*insert privileged group* generally is better off than *disadvantaged group*” is not the same thing as “Everyone in *privileged group* cannot possibly be disadvantaged ever!”
MRAs, it’s not a logical fallacy just because you don’t like it.
@ cloudiah
Why are reality, information sources, and the general public not showing more deference to my maniacal hatred of feminism? Must be the misandry again!
Dammit. I read the mensactivism.org comments.
It can be summed up easily though: 1-commenter not educated about A); 2-Lack of information available during his non-search about A) makes commenter suspicious; 3-Conspiracy between corporations and governments to give free shit to women in return from nothing (perhaps they are white knighting the world). Femilluminatis!
I was reading the wiki page too, I am fascinated by this argument by MRAs:
“it’s a fallacy used by MRAs to rebut feminist arguments like “all men had the power and oppressed women as a gender”, “all men get payed more for their work”, “all men are CEOs or politicians”
Fake fallacy to rebut fake argument! Feminism deactivated.
Is it a fallacy to pull a fallacy out of your ass?
David, please save this quote from PEMRA when troll-of-the-year rolls around:
I mean, that’s a whole new breed of thick, there.
I’m just going to dip my hoe into the water…
I try to keep alert, stay on my hoes…
But I’m covered from head to hoe in BEES.
If you get bees on your hoe stop digging? Way too much going on in that comment.
Is that all the sayings where I can substitute “hoe” for “toe”?
I think there are at least as many sayings as I can count on my fingers and hoes.
(And what’s wrong with being covered with bees?)
Ouch! I just stubbed my big hoe!
It’s just I wasn’t expecting it, is all.
This is why, at the end of the day, I like Wikipedia. Its very stodginess, piles of obnoxious heavily-enforced rules, and anal-retentive review policies are exactly what prevent it from getting clogged up with the random unsourced bullshit opinions of basement-dwelling wankers.