The bedroom fallacy (or the “in the bedroom” fallacy) is a type of binary thinking in which one’s sex life (acts occurring “in the bedroom”) is believed to have no meaningful impact elsewhere in one’s life, society, or other non-erotic pursuits. The term was coined by R. Foxtale1 as part of a response2 to common strawman arguments that attempt to portray rolequeer theory as “simply another meaningless kink and that rolequeer politics boil down to ‘telling people what to do in the bedroom’.” R. Foxtale pointed out a classic pattern in many rape-apologetic arguments that use extreme literalism to downplay or discard many obvious relationships between erotic influences and non-erotic behaviors:

The phrase “I only like X in the bedroom” is a euphemism for “I’m only aroused by X when X exists in an erotic context.” But it is a willfully ignorant form of extreme literalism to extrapolate from that idiom the suggestion that a person who “only likes X in the bedroom” is literally only aroused by X (and that their actions are only ever influenced by that arousal) in a single specific room of their own home, where only other fully-informed adult consenting partners are ever present, with the door closed.

—R. Foxtale (source)

Examples

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External references

1 web.archive.org/web/20150321095047/http...

2 Dissecting “A Brief, Mostly Sane Definition of Rolequeerness,” which is not actually a definition of rolequeerness