The little sex shop on Main Street, Pawtucket, one floor up from the chess club, appears ready to help people find what they’ve been missing.

The books are there, the educational aids, the videos. Megan Andelloux’s two degrees — one from the American College of Sexologists, the other from the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists — hang on the wall.

Megan herself is in residence, ready to put her training to work to help people deal with those things that never happen or happen at the wrong time. She offers counseling, instruction, reading material, a place to drop in and try to explain.

“Think of Planned Parenthood meets feminist sex toy shop,” says Megan.

She is sitting with her husband, Derek, whom she met at the University of Rhode Island, in the coffee shop across the hall from her Center For Sexual Pleasure and Health in the Grant Building in the heart of downtown Pawtucket.

Derek, a resident in family medicine at Brown, sees the center as the beginning of an ever-expanding business that will eventually include medical services.

“But it might not be in Pawtucket,” he says.

Ya think? The city of Pawtucket is not hailing Megan Andelloux for her entrepreneurial spirit, nor her personal approach to small business. City officials apparently see no civic boost in being home to a one-of-a-kind shop that is devoted to making people feel really, really good.

Megan thought she’d be OK when she rented space in the Grant Building. It’s a commercial building. She likes the other tenants and she likes Pawtucket’s appeal to artists. But when she started putting the word out on what she had to offer, she found she had a municipal hurdle or two in front of her.

She had planned to hold her grand opening two weeks ago. It never happened, at least not in the Grant Building, where she had planned for the celebration to spill all over the place. She had to move the event to Thayer Street in Providence.

The space she is in, she’s been told, is not zoned for education. She needs a zoning variance to teach people how to have better sex.

She and her husband went to City Hall. They met with Mayor James Doyle and his chief of staff Harvey Goulet. Goulet says they seem like very nice people. He just doesn’t like what they want to do.

“You have elderly living near there,” says Goulet. “And, usually, the elderly are not too much in favor of stuff like that.”

Actually, I know some elderly folk who are very much in favor of stuff like that. But maybe they haven’t been included in the opinion survey.

Asked whether someone teaching arts and crafts in the same space would have a problem with local zoning laws, Goulet said he didn’t think so.

So it’s about the sex, about the pleasure. Darn near everyone wants both, but when the words go up on a shop window, it sets off alarms in City Hall. Imaginations run wild. Rumors feed on rumors ...

“It’s not porn, which is where most people learn,” says Megan.

She and her husband have hired a lawyer. They plan to challenge the city’s use of zoning laws to keep the center from opening.

“I’m a feisty girl,” she says. “I think adults should be free to seek information.”

No one would argue with that. It’s just a question of whether the world, or at least Pawtucket, is ready to put sexual pleasure right there on Main Street with art galleries and restaurants as part of the downtown shopping experience.

bkerr@projo.com