Two-Sided Casual-Sex Self-Audit
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 8
- Confidence
- —
The Two-Sided Casual-Sex Self-Audit combines Perry’s separate four-question reviews for women and men. The women’s questions test whether apparent participation concealed shame, disgust, emotional attachment, pain, or discomfort. The men’s questions test whether casual sex encouraged disregard, avoidance, emotional ambiguity, or pressure against a partner’s reluctance. Each person answers the four questions relevant to their own conduct as honestly as possible. Perry treats any affirmative answer on the women’s side as a reason to question whether the surrounding sexual culture served that woman’s interests. On the men’s side, she argues that every answer ought to be no. The audit is retrospective and diagnostic rather than a test of legal consent.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Check the burden of virginity
For women: ask whether virginity felt like an embarrassing burden that had to be discarded.
Pro tip Answer according to how you actually felt, not how you thought a liberated person was supposed to feel.
- 2
Check retrospective disgust
For women: ask whether thinking about any consensual past sexual experience now produces disgust.
Watch out Do not automatically reinterpret every negative memory as evidence that legal consent was absent.
- 3
Check concealed attachment
For women: ask whether you became emotionally attached to a casual partner and hid that attachment from him.
Pro tip Distinguish the relationship you wanted from the arrangement you publicly accepted.
- 4
Check concealed discomfort
For women: ask whether you concealed pain or unpleasantness during or after a sexual act.
Watch out Suppressing discomfort to preserve an image of openness prevents honest communication.
- 5
Check social embarrassment
For men: ask whether you had sex with a woman you would have been embarrassed to introduce to your friends.
Pro tip Use the answer to test whether you regarded the partner as a person or only as an opportunity.
- 6
Check post-sex avoidance
For men: ask whether you failed to contact a woman after having sex with her.
Watch out A culture without social penalties can normalize avoidant behavior.
- 7
Check prolonged ambiguity
For men: ask whether you suspected a casual partner was becoming attached but neither committed nor ended the relationship.
Pro tip Resolve the mismatch rather than benefiting from ambiguity.
- 8
Check pressure against reluctance
For men: ask whether you encouraged a woman to do something sexual after she showed reluctance.
Watch out Normality and legality do not make persistent pressure harmless.
In the wild
Perry says she developed the women’s questions through conversations with friends who had once relied on the idea that casual sex was empowering. Some later concluded that they had tolerated experiences that felt wrong because they wanted to see themselves as willing agents rather than as people responding to cultural pressure.
→ Affirmative answers exposed a mismatch between the public narrative and the women’s private reactions.
A woman becomes emotionally attached during a friends-with-benefits arrangement but conceals it. The man suspects her attachment yet continues without committing or ending the relationship. Applying both halves of the audit reveals concealed needs on one side and avoidant conduct on the other.
→ The audit identifies mutual incomprehension and a preventable source of emotional harm.
Common mistakes
Answering as your idealized self
The audit fails if answers reflect the identity a person wants to project rather than their actual feelings and behavior.
Using the audit as a legal verdict
The questions evaluate emotional fit and moral conduct; they do not independently determine whether a crime occurred.
Excusing conduct because it is common
Perry argues that casual-sex culture can reward harmful behavior and remove social penalties without making that behavior right.
From the transcript
“did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden you wanted to be rid of”
“have you ever done something sexually that you found painful or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner either during sex or afterwards”
“the answer to all of these questions ought to be no but a culture of casual sex incentivizes men to do such things and generally…”
From the episode
Louise Perry: The Case Against The Sexual Revolution
Louise Perry