Before Mathew Gerson was the CEO of Foria — the world’s première cannabis lube brand — he spent a decade studying to be a Buddhist monk. ​“I didn’t become a monk, and I still had the same aspirations to work, through my contributions, toward some forms of suffering that I thought were avoidable.”

After choosing a secular life instead, Gerson found work that was socially important to him in the form of Sir Richard’s, a condom company he founded that was, in his words, ​“like Tom’s for condoms.”

“Working in that field,” Gerson recalled to Civilized. ​“I was able to learn a lot about sex positivity and gender and identity, and gender inequality in and out of the bedroom and in and out of the lab.”

These ideas led Gerson to ruminate on the issues of sexuality, and the ways human sexuality is tied to our global well-being. He found himself compelled to work on a product that would address an inequity he had grown acutely aware of — the ​“pleasure gap,” or disparity of emphasis placed on the importance of women’s pleasure. Thus the idea for Foria Pleasure, the popular cannabis-based lube was born.

Cannabis and female pleasure, have, according to Gerson, long been intertwined. ​“We certainly didn’t invent the weed lube,” he explained. ​“There has been a tremendous amount of documented cases of medicine women, midwives, witches using cannabis as a salve for intimacy, pre- and post-natal, menstruation.”