It’s just gone midday and the champagne is already flowing at Soho House 76 Dean Street. Which is a tad early, even for louche journalists, but welcome fortification for the workshop ahead. I’ve been invited to the London launch of The Pleasure Atelier — a wellness-orientated adult sex education session that promises to banish shame and connect us with our sensuality.
It’s a world away from an awkward PSHE class. The Pleasure Atelier’s founder and resident clinical sexologist Marie Morice couldn’t be more different from having a gym teacher fumbling with condoms and cucumbers. Morice is French, for starters, and despite having lived in London for 30 years is stereotypically chic in an effortless way — she eschews makeup but has the kind of glow that makes you wonder if regular orgasms are the keystone to a good skincare routine.
This will be an “immersive workshop” she promises us, before reassuring us that “I’m not going to ask you to get naked.” She’s a funny and laid back presenter, unsurprising perhaps given her pre sex expert career includes 25 years working in global climate sustainability for organisations such as the UN.
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Her abrupt pivot into retraining as a sexologist was triggered by her own midlife divorce. Having married young, she found herself single and dating and surprised by the recalibration required to enjoy an active sex life. “There were a lot of young men,” she smiles. “But it was also a very lonely space.” Now she specialises in coaching women who have gone through divorce and/or menopause, who may have been very successful in other areas of their life but find this one area frankly, well, frustrating.
Being unmarried and in my early thirties, I’m not quite in the target audience (yet) but it was deeply reassuring to be around women of all ages engaging with the topic of self pleasure seriously. I’ll admit, even the idea of perimenopause terrifies me; it feels so unfair that just when you’ve got comfortable with your body that nature switches it up on you. At one point in the workshop, a doctor gave us a debrief about how decreased estrogen during menopause can cause labia shrinkage and I was astounded that a) this happens and b) no one had bothered to warn me.
We start with a whistlestop tour of women’s pleasure in a historical and sociological context. From the fertility worship of the Ancient Egyptians and the erotic sanctity of the Karma Sutra through to the rise of Catholicism and Puritanism through to the Salem Witch Trials and those freaks the Victorians. Did you know that the Malleus Maleficarum’s description of witches closely aligns with that of a (post)menopausal woman?
When Morice flashes a picture of Sigmund Freud up on the screen, there’s a loud chorus of boos. I mean, it’s hard not to have beef with Freud, the coke-snorting founder of psychoanalysis (but not, crucially, a psychologist), especially if you subscribe to Florence Rush’s theory of the Freudian Coverup.
But these heckles were specifically over his ridiculous theory that orgasms from clitoral stimulation are “immature” and the only true way to climax is via penetration. This pernicious idea has stuck around since he published it in 1905 despite studies showing, as Morice repeatedly informed us, that 95 per cent of women need clitoral stimulation of some form to climax. Something that you either figure out on your own (and are doomed to spend a lifetime explaining the basics to sexual partners who think it’s odd, ugh), or gets you stuck in the dreaded orgasm gap.
Yes, in 2025 this is still a thing. Per the headline-grabbing 2017 study, 95 per cent of heterosexual men in America reported orgasming every time they had sex, compared to a paltry 65 per cent of women (lesbians reported 86 per cent and bisexual women 66 per cent — make of that what you will). Morice isn’t highlighting this just to dunk on straight men for being selfish in bed. After all, if you don’t know how to get yourself off then how the hell can you expect your partner to get you there?
Class was then seated for an anatomy lesson. Not to toot my own horn (or should that be flick my own bean) but I’d consider myself an expert on the clitoris as the owner of one and the enjoyer of others’. A sex nerd that’s done all the reading and passed all the practicals. I keep my favourite sex toy (a Womanizer X Lovehoney Pro40 Rechargeable Clitoral Stimulator) under my pillow. So I thought I knew exactly what a human clitoris looks like — the funky bulbous five-pronged octopus style shape popularised by #feminist jewellery lines!
But when Morice passed around her educational vagina model — complete with demountable labia — I was truly shooketh to realise that’s only the clit in its engorged state. When unaroused, it looks more like a deflated, sad squid. Which makes complete sense given the physical changes undertaken by cis male anatomy. I’d just never considered it.
A brand that does spend a lot of time considering the female anatomy is Womanizer, chief sponsors of the event, who had brought along some of their newest toys to show us at the workshop. I’m something of a Womanizer super fan — see above, plus my longform investigation of how they helped develop the world’s first shower head designed for female masturbation. My original BFF toy risks being usurped by the younger and sexier Womanizer Enhance, now with rumbles (IFYKYK).
Ironically, it’s the guided journaling element of the workshop that I found most challenging. Morice’s long-time collaborator (the pair wrote Morice’s first steamy novel together, under a nom de plume) and writer Amy Killingbeck was there to reassure us. But making a mind map of my pleasure or responding to the prompt about making “a self love commitment to myself” brought me out in cold sweats.
Something about putting intimate thoughts and private feelings down on paper felt… decadent, somehow? This is a test you can’t ace — it’s something deeply personal. I’m not at the affirming mantras part of my self-love journey, even if masturbation is an ideal shortcut to silencing my inner critic.
But then education is designed to challenge, even if it’s sex education. The Pleasure Atelier makes it welcoming and fun, and adult in every sense of the word. Technically X-rated, yes (thanks, Puritans) but sophisticated and glamorous too.
Sign up for The Pleasure Atelier here.
