What does it really mean to “obey your parents”? And what happens when obedience becomes suffocation?

In this pillar episode, Salma is joined by an anonymous guest, Fatima, for a deeply honest conversation about emotional enmeshment, delayed adulthood, and what it actually takes to cut the cord. Fatima grew up in a close-knit Arab Muslim family in the U.K. where independence was only acceptable through marriage. Despite being asexual and aromantic - and having no interest in men - she was taught that the only way out of her parents’ house was as a wife.

What followed was a years-long attempt to do everything right: changing careers (from architecture to engineering to teaching) to appear more “wife-friendly,” tolerating constant scrutiny, and engaging in the arranged marriage process as an exit strategy rather than a desire. That path ultimately led to a breaking point when Fatima was GHOSTED AT HER KATB KITAB (Islamic Wedding) and then blamed by her parents, accused of wrongdoing, and subjected to even more control. It was then that she realized what so many adult children eventually learn: there is no finish line, no amount of obedience that guarantees peace, and no way to make your parents happy by sacrificing yourself.

In this episode, Fatima walks us through the practical, financial, and emotional steps she took to move out of her parents’ house, including how she secretly saved money, planned her exit, managed guilt, and rebuilt her life afterward. Salma weaves in her own experience of individuation, grief, and the disorienting freedom that comes after leaving and rebuilding a life without parental guardrails.

This conversation is for anyone who keeps asking, “How do I actually get out?” If this episode stirs up anger, grief, or urgency in you, that doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful. It means you’re waking up.

This is a pillar episode of the podcast. If you listen to only one, let it be this one.

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Editor: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy

In this solo episode, Salma Hindy recounts attending a sex club in Berlin, where a man violated her and then tried to disappear - only to be confronted months later, unexpectedly, at a comedy show in New York. She reflects on what it meant to call him out publicly on stage, reclaiming a sense of power she didn’t realize she’d lost. She reflects on the first feeling she noticed immediately following the assault: not anger that he crossed her boundaries, but sadness that he had left.

She walks through the reality of sex clubs and sex parties beyond fantasy: leaving phones at the door, navigating explicitly sexual environments without pressure to participate, and choosing observation over access. Salma speaks candidly about vaginismus, bodily boundaries, two years of celibacy, and how her body understands trust long before her mind does.

Despite what happened in Berlin, she still chose to attend a sex party in Beverly Hills a month later: a very different experience shaped by a consent assembly, brief but confronting eye-contact exercises, and an atmosphere built around communication rather than coercion. There was also the frivolous indulgence: getting her first STD test, watching a close friend have a threesome, rope performers, sensual complimentary massages, squirting competitions, kinky dungeons, queer kisses, and being offered lots of drugs (a sex-party love language).

With humor, softness, and clarity, Salma explores the difference between sexual freedom and sexual obligation, what safety actually feels like in sexual spaces, why being in a sexual environment doesn’t mean owing anyone access to your body, and why wanting tenderness (even in the most explicit environments) isn’t naïve, but deeply human.

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Cinematographer: Ian Ritter
Studio: 30 Irving Studios
Editor: Salma Hindy

Writer: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy

Comedian, writer, and actor Tarek Ziad becomes the first Muslim man (and first queer man) to join the podcast. Like two besties at a slumber party, Salma and Tarek honestly and hilariously unravel everything their communities tell them to hide: queerness, shame, corporal punishment, disownment, religion, sexual repression, and the long, painful road toward loving yourself.

Tarek shares his journey growing up Berber (Amazigh) in a strict Moroccan household in Florida: from being punished for harmless physical contact with the opposite gender, to enduring violence and religious guilt, to getting into Yale, exploring his sexuality and cutting off his parents for his own survival, to eventually being disowned after coming out.

Salma opens up about calling child services on her abusive brother-in-law, losing access to her nephews, and the real reason her family cut her off (hint: it wasn’t the hijab - it was her sexuality). She also shares her father’s iconic line, “Let’s just agree the gays are going to hell,” and her equally iconic clapback.

Together they explore:

• how repression destroys entire generations
• Muslim queerness vs. white queerness
• whether you must abandon culture or family to live authentically
• what Islam actually says about sexuality
• the obsession with top/bottom labels
• vaginismus vs. bottoming fear
• indigenous Amazigh tattoo traditions
• breaking cycles of violence and shame
• finding chosen family and safer community
• the privilege and danger of “coming out” in MENA contexts

This episode is a portal: painful, funny, deeply human, and radically liberating.
It's a love letter to everyone raised on fear who is now trying to build a life rooted in truth.

This episode is dedicated to Salma’s 17 nieces and nephews - she loves you no matter what.

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Cinematographer: Patrick Samaha
Studio: 30 Irving Studios
Editor: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy

TW: SEXUAL, PHYSICAL & EMOTIONAL ABUSE

From the outside, Sara’s life looked like a dream: a respected gynecologist father, a big Gulf family, religious prestige, and the illusion of stability. Inside, it was a battlefield.

At five years old, she was molested by her father - the same man who later walked her down the aisle. Her childhood was chaos: screaming, bloody domestic fights, a mother beaten and belittled, and a nervous system that learned to survive before it ever felt safe.

Years later, after surviving addiction, rebellion, and trying to rebuild her life, Sara faced her second heartbreak: her siblings kicked her out, called her a “cunt,” turned their faces away from her, and left her estranged for seven years. Sara calls that day her crucifixion - the moment her entire family abandoned her.

We talk about: surviving childhood sexual abuse; watching violence erupt daily in her home; EMDR, trauma healing, and nervous system recovery; being disowned and estranged by her siblings; losing her mother to heartbreak after divorce; addiction, double lives, rebellion, survival; and raising a child while reparenting her own inner child.

Sara is the Arab daughter who refused to stay silent. The one reparenting her nervous system after a lifetime of flinching at yelling, and healing from the violence we were told to normalize.

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Editor: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy

Jasmine Sherni is the daughter of a Pakistani Muslim father and an Ashkenazi Jewish mother. Often bullied as a “fake Jew”, Jasmine is an adult performer who went viral after her first Bollywood p*rn scene, becoming the representation so many people had been waiting for. With over 34 million views on P*rnHub, Jasmine shares her journey from strict-dad households to BDSM stages, from ICU nursing to adult stardom, while navigating devastating loss - the sudden death of her older sister, her mother’s passing from cancer - and the complicated family dynamics of building a career her father chooses not to acknowledge.

This episode dives into grief, bisexuality, exclusion, and power. Jasmine tears up imagining what her late mother might say if she could see her now, and reflects on feeling unwelcome in her New Orleans Muslim community throughout childhood, the waves of “coming out,” and why sex work became the first place she truly belonged. Unapologetically bold, Jasmine’s story is proof that what daddy doesn’t know can become your greatest power. And that every woman in our lineage has brought us to this moment…so that we may do whatever the f*ck we want.

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Cinematographer: Ian Ritter
Studio: 30 Irving Studios
Editor: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy

Nobody loves overthinking sex more than Muslim women in their 20s and 30s trying to make up for a stolen teenhood. This week, Salma sits down with California-born Pakistani-American Aleeyaa for a raw, hilarious, and soul-baring conversation about sex, rejection, and agency. From learning about sex in a USC classroom to carrying the weight of “no sex before marriage” since age 12, Aleeyaa unpacks what it means to navigate desire, boundaries, and shame in Muslim and South Asian households.

Together, Salma and Aleeyaa cover it all:

• Why Muslim women have their “teen years” in their 30s
• The triangle of sexual health: health, rights, and pleasure
• Kissing as the most intimate act (even more than sex)
• Best and worst hookup stories (including a condom fail disaster)
• Why rejection feels existential and how to own your desire anyway
• The pressure of friends’ choices, hookup culture, and consensus-building
• How pleasure isn’t just sex, but a way of living

Salma shares her funniest and most vulnerable stories: from sobbing after casual rejection to her best night of sex that didn’t even involve sex, while Aleeyaa reminds us that figuring it out IS the agency.

Salma and Aleeyaa also talk about the role of friends: the sacredness of attraction, asking your girls to step back from someone you like, and learning how to protect and voice your own desire without shame.

If you’ve ever been friendzoned your whole life, carried shame around desire, or struggled to balance sexual liberation with cultural expectations, this episode is proof that figuring it out IS the agency.

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Cinematographer: Ian Ritter
Studio: 30 Irving Studios
Editor: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy

Doppelgängers Salma Hindy and Sarah Arabic (who share the SAME 9/11 birthday) finally sit down face-to-face to talk about everything sex. Sarah grew up in Baghdad with no sex education and a family that never spoke about periods, pleasure, or intimacy. After moving to Dubai for college, she found freedom in her dorm room, exploring porn as an unexpected form of sex education. At 18, she discovered her first orgasm through Tumblr blogs, teaching herself piece by piece. Later, she earned a master’s degree in finance, only to leave corporate America behind to follow her curiosity into OnlyFans, Fetlife, adult conventions, and eventually the adult film industry. Today, three years in, she has over a million Instagram followers and 53M views on Pornhub.

In this conversation, Sarah gets candid about the self-conversations that helped her shed guilt and shame and the way she’s built a career entirely on her own terms. She shares her philosophy that curiosity - not clout - is her compass, and why “the second prn feels like work is the beginning of my downfall.” We talk consent, boundaries, and risk, with Sarah’s refreshingly practical view: there’s always risk, in life and in sex, but each person gets to decide how much they’re willing to take.

Highlights include:
- How exploring the kink community shaped Sarah’s boundaries in porn
- What happens if you change your mind mid-shoot
- Sarah’s perspective on what makes sex sacred
- Her experiences traveling to shoot
- Why she loves staying single with a wide net of partners
- Why she won’t perform acts that aren’t her kink
- Her aftercare rituals
- Her perspective on Mia Khalifa’s legacy
- Whether the community will ever “take you back” after stepping outside its norms

Plus: Salma admits to watching one of Sarah’s videos, and Sarah shares her wildest DM request. Salma also opens up about her celibacy and the fears she carries around sex. They also dive into the only moral regret in Salma’s career, and her dream of one day directing feminist porn.

Sarah’s wish for other women is that they see her and think, “I can do whatever I want.”

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Cinematographer: Ian Ritter
Studio: 30 Irving Studios
Editor: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy

What happens when the person you love turns out to be violent, racist, and determined to ruin you? This week, Algerian-American comedian Hedya joins Salma to share her shocking journey of falling for a man who seemed like home after years of family tension and cultural expectations, only to find herself trapped in a cycle of abuse. During the pandemic lockdown, he pushed her, dragged her out of the kitchen, and even locked her on the balcony. Yet two days later, she found herself baking him lasagna and chocolate cake, caught in the grip of trauma bonding. When he later sued her for custody of their dog and won, and began pursuing defamation lawsuits against her, Hedya was left financially drained but still fighting to reclaim her voice.

In this raw conversation, Hedya speaks openly about reparenting herself, navigating the push and pull of being Arab-American, and learning to reconnect with her body and self-worth after years of shame. Salma reflects on her own experiences with domestic violence growing up, as well as the heartbreak and frustration of watching a friend remain in an abusive relationship, and why society still struggles to support survivors unless they fit the mold of a “perfect victim.” Together, they unpack the messy realities of faith, family, abuse, and survival and the courage it takes to finally take your power back.

CREDITS:

Host & Creator: Salma Hindy
Executive Producer: Salma Hindy
Cinematographer: Patrick Samaha
Studio: 30 Irving Studios
Editor: Salma Hindy
Artwork: Rana Omar

© The Secret Sex Lives of Muslim Women, 2025

Instagram: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

YouTube: @thesecretsexlivesofmuslimwomen

HOST'S INSTAGRAM: @salma.hindy

HOST'S TIKTOK: @salma.hindy