Pictured: Anna Hushlak and Billie Quinlan

“If you were in a relationship and plodding along and distracting yourself with dinners with friends… then suddenly you’re in the four walls of your home with that person, seeing how they’re treating you, how you’re treating them, it gave you an opportunity to ask: ‘Do I want to come out with this pandemic in the same way or do I want to come out as a different person? What needs to change for me to do that?’”

When people sign up and pay the £40 annual membership fee, one of their first steps can be an “onboarding” video call with Quinlan herself to outline what they’re hoping to get out of using Ferly. She’s struck by how many women over 50 join up, saying they want to educate themselves on pleasure and good sex. 

Many are recently separated and looking forward to their next chapter in their lives or finally feeling old and confident enough to cast off any taboos of their upbringing.

“One woman was Catholic and had just gone through a divorce,” she recounts, “So you can imagine there was all that shame around that. She said that she came to us because, after the divorce, she lost all sense of herself and all of her self-worth. All of this information came out about her partner having affairs; she just hit rock bottom and felt completely disgusted by her own body, so was using Ferly as part of her journey of rediscovery.”

With their focus on mindfulness, sexual wellness as an important part of women’s health and their inclusive nature, Hushlak and Quinlan consider themselves part of the current sexual revolution, which seems to have hit its stride in the past year.

“I think when we look back at the first sexual revolution in the Sixties and Seventies, that was the sexual revolution for men. We talk about this current period being the pleasure revolution for women. Women are coming into their own sexually,” says Quinlan.

With sex toys for women now available to buy in supermarkets, and lots of work being done to educate women about the orgasm gap (far fewer heterosexual women climax during sex than men or women in any other category), this does appear to be true. And while it started before the pandemic, it has in some ways benefited from it.

The Natsal study found bigger increases in sex toy use than in “partnered physical activity”, and female-led dating app Bumble worked with artist Alice Skinner on their raunchy high profile “keep the home fires burning” billboard advertising campaign, encouraging their single members to look for satisfaction “closer to home”, let’s say, rather than breaking lockdown guidance. 

It’s been a long time coming. As well as consistent data around the orgasm gap, a Public Health England survey of 7000 women in 2018 found that 51 per cent of them had experienced at least one sexual difficulty (including lack of sexual enjoyment) lasting three months or more in the previous year. 

“The way men define bad sex is if they didn’t have an orgasm and the way women define it as the absence of pain,” says Quinlan, referring to observations made by Professor Debby Herbenick, of the US equivalent of Natsal. “That’s so depressing. And it really speaks to how low our standards and expectations are.”

While sexual freedom isn’t a zero sum game – women improving their own body confidence and awareness doesn’t mean the opposite has to happen to men – Quinlan acknowledges that it might seem like that sometimes.

“It feels like women are going through this moment of empowerment and change and men are slightly left behind,” she says. “In that they don’t have the support or guidance or the same social narrative of empowerment around them that women have. It’s creating this divide and… blame culture is the wrong word, but, it’s a bit like we don’t understand them and they don’t understand us.”

Citing incels as an example – single men who rage about being “involuntarily celibate” because they can’t attract women they deem to be beautiful enough for them – Quinlan says she thinks these extreme and divided online communities are partly caused by the fact we’ve lost our middle ground.

“I think generally, as a society, we just need to be so much more empathetic to each other,” she says.

“We are so quick to pounce on people that slip up or make a mistake or say the wrong thing, that it becomes terrifying to say anything at all. So we go into these little isolated communities where we feel safe enough to express them and there’s no diversity or [critical] thought in there. And that is a real challenge.”

But things are looking hopeful. 12 per cent of Ferly users are men who want to learn more about that perennial question – what do women want?

“We couldn’t be more explicit that we’re for women,” says Quinlan, “but there’s still… men that come in and…say, ‘I know this isn’t for me, but I’m trying to learn about the female experience and I’m trying to understand her needs and what she wants…’.”

Hopefully they’re finding their answers.