Last week my charity the Family Planning Association (FPA), which campaigns for and educates on good sexual health for everyone in the UK, launched a new venture – an online sex toy shop.

But FPA Pleasure is far more than that. As well as a fundraiser, it is a hub for information, advice and opinion pieces on everything about sexual enjoyment and wellbeing.

It’s raised a few eyebrows, even though FPA has a long history of speaking honestly and frankly about sex – the charity is 85 this year, having formed as the National Birth Control Council in 1930.

But that sort of proves the point of why FPA Pleasure needs to exist. As a society we are still not comfortable talking openly about sexual pleasure, often put down to “something about being British” – whatever that means.

While moving offices recently I saw a magazine article in our archive that had been written around a decade ago describing female masturbation as the last taboo. I remembered I had seen the same headline in an article from just a few months previously. Have we really not moved on?

The internet has opened up many conversations around sex and has given a voice to a new generation who aren’t embarrassed to talk about what they like and don’t like. And, we are moving, although sometimes it feels at a snail’s pace, towards a more equal society for everyone regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Attitudes towards sex toys also seem to have changed – they’re no longer hidden behind blacked out windows down back alleys, and many people now see them for what they are, devices that can add to the pleasure you have, either alone or with a partner or partners.

But all in all we’re still not very good at talking about sex. We only have to look at what young people are taught to see how far off the mark we are. We still don’t have statutory sex and relationships education, despite overwhelming evidence that it is what parents want, what teachers want, and most importantly what young people want.

Current provision is patchy and pupils who are given the lesson time to explore the idea that most sex happens for reasons of desire, intimacy and pleasure, and not for reproduction, are distinctly in the minority.

Against a backdrop of wanting to tackle this, and really putting sexual pleasure at the heart of our 85th-birthday year, we came up with the idea of FPA Pleasure because it also helps us to achieve our wider charitable aims.

With the vast majority of our income from publication sales, delivering training courses, direct funding for projects, and government funding for producing sexual health information, we don’t expect FPA Pleasure to be one of our major income streams.

We envisage it will account for a tiny percentage initially, but we have an ambition to grow. We want to expand our product range, and particularly welcome feedback from customers on what they would like us to sell.

It’s a tough time for charities, and we are among those that have suffered funding cuts in recent years. But it’s also an exciting time for us to change how we work, and one element of that is thinking more entrepreneurially.

Being able to support, at first in a small way, the wider of work of FPA across the UK through a venture which in itself is supporting people’s sexual health and wellbeing is a win-win situation.

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