“Sex to me has never been something to be ashamed of. I grew up in France, my dad is Lebanese and my mum is French, and like all the teenagers there, I was lucky enough to get access to all the information I needed about sexual health:  how to protect myself, what are the STIs, etc. In short, I knew how to have a healthy and safe sexual life. 

In 2001, I came to Lebanon to study medicine, and I experienced a culture shock. I was living in the AUB dorms, and I was surrounded by people coming from all over the country. The ambiance was pretty conservative. I realized how heavy the taboo surrounding sex was, and how much young people lacked access to sexual information. I felt different, too open-minded, I felt that I could not express myself without people judging me. Young Lebanese were having kind of a late teenage crisis: there were going through stuff in uni that I had already lived during my high school years. I took me years to get used to the mentalities.

At that time, Lebanon was much more conservative towards matters related to sex. It was hard for instance to find a gynecologist that would not judge his patients for not being a virgin anymore. And in pharmacies, girls who were buying pregnancy tests were frowned upon. Even during my gynecology training, we were taught to ask patients if they were married rather than sexual active… as if people could not have sexual relations outside wedlock!

Once I got my medical degree, I specialized in gynecology at AUB. I initially wanted to be a psychiatrist, but I felt something so intense while helping with my first delivery that I changed my mind. I went on to specialize in fertility issues in Belgium and I opened my medical office here in Lebanon in 2014.

Even if mentalities have changed  these past 15 years, there is still a huge lack of sexual education in Lebanon, because of the taboo surrounding sex. I still have young girls, (18-25 years old)  who ask me basic questions such as “ Can I lose my virginity while horse riding ?” “How do I put in a tampon ?”,“What does that mean if my periods are one day late?”,”Can I have a virginity certificate?”.
Girls are obsessed with their virginity, which they confuse with having their hymen. But these 2 are not related! Some girls are born without a hymen, other have a super elastic hymen that stretches and does no bleed the first time they have sex, etc. Technically speaking, you are a virgin until you have sex, and even that is open to interpretation. So no, I don’t deliver virginity certificate nor do I conduct virginity tests : because there is no way to know if a woman is still a virgin by looking at her hymen ! Plus, the World Health Organization considers such practices as torture : there are sexist, traumatizing and not scientific.

But it’s not young people’s fault if they have no clue about sexuality. They can’t get the info at school or at home. So they try to get it from websites that are not reliable, or even from porn. 

I wanted to do something about this, I wanted to bring them medical and scientific answers to their interrogations, in short, I wanted to provide them with a sexual education:  information related to STIs, contraception, consent, how to take the pill, why pap smears matter, etc. Because, at the end of the end, it’s their health that’s at stake!

That’s how I got the idea in October 2017 to launch an Insta page (@dr.gael) where I provide young people with the information they need to live a safe sexual life. The page also includes information on women’s health in general, pregnancy and infertility. I also give conferences to parents on how to talk about sex with their younger ones (children and teenagers). Sexual education starts from a young age !

Because guess what, even if sex remains taboo in Lebanon, people are still having sex!  And I am sure that if you teach the young generation, and especially young women, to know their bodies and to take care of it, we would avoid severe pathologies (STIs…) and unsafe practices (unwanted pregnancies, sexual abuses…). It’s called prevention !” 

Gaël Abou Ghannam, 35, practices gynecology since 2014 in Lebanon, in a private office and at Bellevue Medical Center. She has launched in 2017 an Insta page where she tackle issues linked to women’s health and sexuality. Her ambition is to help the new generation of Lebanese to have a healthy and happy sexual life.

This article is part of our series on sexuality in Lebanon, #LFonsexuality

Reporting and writing: Nada Maucourant Atallah & Soraya Hamdan
Picture: Nada Maucourant Atallah
Editing: MJ Daoud