Episode: 114 — "Sex: Things You Don't Know — Dr. Atallah" · Full Episode #114
Language: Arabic, with French and English code-switching
Dr. Sandrine Atallah (د. ساندرين عطالله) is a Lebanese-French clinical sexologist based in Beirut. She practises at the American University of Beirut Medical Center and trained in sexology at Université René Descartes (Paris V) in France. She hosts the Arabic-language podcast Haki Sarih (حكي صريح — "Frank Talk"), which addresses sexual health questions in the region's first language, rather than through the imported clinical English most Arab-region practitioners default to.
In 2022, a TikTok video went viral in the Gulf in which a man held up what he claimed was the bloodied virginity sheet from his wedding night and presented it as proof of his bride's honour. Sandrine recorded a rebuttal as a clinical practitioner. Her response set out the medical facts that public conversation in the region had refused to allow into the air: that the hymen is not a seal, that its presence or absence is not evidence of anything, that bleeding on a wedding night is not a reliable indicator of prior sexual activity, and that the public theatre of the sheet is a humiliation built on a medical fiction. The video reached millions and produced both backlash and a wave of private messages from women who said they had carried the fiction for years.
See: The Virginity Sheet
When she first began appearing on Arab television to discuss sexual health, the threats came almost immediately. She described receiving death threats as a routine cost of practising her speciality in Arabic for an Arab audience. She did not present this as exceptional courage. She presented it as the consequence of doing in Arabic what is already done routinely in French and English in the same hospitals — naming the body, naming the practice, naming the dysfunction.
Her summary of the regional pattern was direct: "In Arab countries we hide this information from women, as if her sexuality is dangerous." She traced the cost across the clinical picture she sees daily — marriages collapsing for reasons that could have been resolved with one accurate sentence delivered ten years earlier, women in their thirties presenting with shame attached to anatomical features that are within the normal range, men whose only education on the subject was pornography or rumour.
She made a specific argument for working in Arabic rather than the imported clinical English most regional specialists default to. Patients do not present in English. They present in the language they were raised in, which is also the language the shame was installed in. Removing the shame requires using the same language. Haki Sarih exists because the clinical conversation has to be available in the language the body was taught to be silent in.
Her training at Université René Descartes shaped a practice that is European in its evidence base and Arab in its delivery. She returned to Beirut deliberately, rather than building a practice in France. The choice was a clinical one: the unmet need was not in Paris.
"In Arab countries we hide this information from women, as if her sexuality is dangerous." (EP 114)