Frontman fallacy
The frontman fallacy is an informal fallacy that was proposed by Peter Zohrab during the 1990s following a discussion on Usenet, an early online discussion forum.[1]
The frontman fallacy is the mistaken belief that people, especially men, who are in positions of authority in democratic systems use their power mainly to benefit people like themselves.
The frontman fallacy is somewhat similar to the later apex fallacy.
We hunted the mammoth
The website "tracking and mocking misogyny" wehuntedthemammoth.com criticised this exact passage as follows:
- 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!
However, there is evidence that powerful men will favour women in their decision making. Here are three examples of that:
- Joe Biden, president of the United States and thus arguably the most (formally) powerful man in the world, has a plan to "end violence against women" and he also wrote the Violence Against Women Act of 1994[2].
- While the CEO of YouTube is a woman (Susan Wojcicki), the CEO of the company that owns YouTube is a man (Sundar Pichai). The Google-owned video hosting website known as YouTube allowed Ava Brighton to make money with a video of a translation of a radical feminist teacher suggesting that 25 % of boys should be castrated while demonetising all other videos that were critical of feminism[3]. The more powerful of these two people, whoever they might be, had no interest in protecting Ava nor men.
- if Susan is more powerful than Sundar, she had no interest in protecting Ava, a female content creator, despite being a woman herself
- if Sundar is more powerful than Susan, he had no interest in protecting men (like Ava did) despite being one himself
- The powerful man José Luis Zapatero legislated the "Gender Violence Law" in Spain with the aim of "protecting women", but with the result of any man accused by a woman of domestic violence will immediately be declared guilty[4].
In these cases the frontman fallacy should be obvious, and more examples do exist of course.
RationalWiki
The previously quoted We hunted the mammoth article is used as a source in the RationalWiki article of the apex fallacy, where the frontman fallacy has a subsection. RationalWiki comments the same definition of the frontman fallacy quoted at the start of this article as follows:
- Again, "frontman fallacy" appears to only be used on MRA websites. Zohrab himself has written that Marc Lepine, school shooter of 14 women, was "not only not sexist, as the media stated – he was actually fighting sexism" and was "protesting against various issues which are aspects of Feminist sexism".[18] Perhaps as a result, MRAs rarely cite Zohrab as the intellectual forefather of one of their favorite talking points.
The source used for the first sentence (marked with "[18]") is the We hunted the mammoth article, not the full article itself (by Peter Zohrab). The full article has a note on the top condemning Lepine's actions (suggesting that MRAs generally do not condone violence), though to be fair, it wasn't added there by Zohrab.
- While no one can condone the mass murders by Lepine, Zohrab is willing to ask questions about his motives that few others have done.
Wiki4Men does acknowledge Zohrab as the creator of the term "frontman fallacy". It can also be noted that the idea that powerful men don't often use their power to benefit other men can be talked about without mentioning the term "frontman fallacy". A thing does not cease to be true just because the person saying it aloud does something bad. For example, if we were to discover, hypothetically, that Charles Darwin was a child molester, that would not disprove the theory of evolution, even though creationists would surely celebrate a finding like that. The word "evolution" could still be changed to something else, but it wouldn't change the fact that all living organisms on Earth have a common ancestor. Similarly, MRAs could stop using the term "frontman fallacy" but that would not invalidate the notion that powerful men often use their power to benefit women instead of men.
Also, in the mainstream media we often hear how Black Lives Matter is a movement fighting for racial justice. The fact that many of their members have committed violence in the name of their movement is usually unmentioned, as is the fact that the policies that they pursue are counterproductive to their stated cause (though they've removed the evidence for that from their website). The reposter on the forum where Zohrab's article is hosted condemned Lepine's actions while Zohrab (and, unfortunately, some commenters) did not. Paul Elam's words regarding Roy Den Hollander certainly suggest that, at least nowadays, that the more prominent an MRA you are, the less likely you are to support violence and the ones that do are kicked out of MRA groups, as happened to Den Hollander long before the murder of Marc Angelucci and Esther Salas's family members[5].