I’m not a big pot person. I can’t really find my “therapeutic window” when it comes to smoking weed. I know exactly how much cocaine or meth I can handle in one sitting, and morphine doses will ebb and flow with the consistency of my usage, but when it comes to smoking weed, every single toke is one too many, and I end up getting so “in my head” that I want to jump through an open window. I sound like my dad now, but pot is c-r-a-z-y these days. It’s goddamn super-pot. Pot on speed. Pot enhanced with more pot and then thrown in a bouncy-castle blender of THC and shaken up to be even stronger. I’ll do any drug in the world, but I usually shake my head “no” to a bong.
So when I heard about Foria, the world’s first cannabis lube designed especially to enhance female sexual pleasure, I thought that this would be an excellent way to beat my pot fear. My head wouldn’t be doing the work, my vagina would, and I trust my vagina more than I trust my head.
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Last week in Los Angeles, I met up with Matthew Gerson, Foria’s creator (or “Wellness Director,” as he is referred to by his collective, the Aphrodite Group). After I emailed Foria asking for samples for my story, Gerson was eager to hang out and talk about his creation.
Gerson has this theory about females, sexuality, and plants. I think I’m with him.
“I have some marijuana plants growing right now,” he explained. “And if you spend time with this plant, it’s a fascinating weed. Marijuana is essentially a very horny female plant. It’s the female that is harvested and secretes the fluid, wants to be pollinated, and when it’s pollinated becomes stressed out and produces more and more. There’s this weird connection between the human female and the female plant. We have evolved with plants. We have a receptor that successfully absorbs THC. We have that capacity to absorb the pollen the plant secretes because our physiology co-evolved.”
Gerson isn’t your stereotypical pot activist, and maybe that’s because he isn’t one. Aesthetically, he’s not granola in the slightest, and he admits he only got into working with cannabis when the idea for Foria was dreamed up. In his 20s, Gerson was studying to become a Buddhist monk but soon changed his focus from the monastic to aspirations of health and wellness. (He’s a big Paul Farmer believer and is all about lessening human suffering.) Gerson then started Sir Richard’s Condom Company with his friend Mark Batiste when inspired by a friend’s TED Talk. It was an experiment in branding and safe sex that took him and Sir Richard’s to Haiti.
“I was in that company for three years,” Gerson explained. “It got me a little more interested in the sex side of health.
“I haven’t been a pot smoker for a long time. It’s a strong medicine for me. The pot is better, and there’s more knowledge floating around. You can self-medicate, but you can also do it so, so wrong. I had used pot in my life with partners while being intimate. There’s something there, you know? I started doing research, and marijuana as an aphrodisiac is pretty well documented—Chinese medicine, Hindu practices, as well as many other cultures,” Gerson said. “No one just smokes pot anymore; there are all these super-refined ways of doing it. Soon I was introduced to oils. So, being from the world of condoms and sexual health, when I heard oil, I immediately thought of lube. I used coconut oil in Foria because it’s a really good one for feminine hygiene. It happens to mist really well.”
Gerson surrounded by the greenery he no longer partakes of. Photo via Facebook
Gerson spoke with physicians (he also grew up raised by two of them) and made sure what he was going to make was safe. It was. Foria went through many phases, and Gerson developed the best version of pre-lube (Foria should not actually be used as a lube—a few sprays an hour before sex is the trick) he could by working closely with proprietary scientists who could help him perfect the dosage and potency. No pesticides, no molds, no nothing. So far, Foria is only available in California for people with medical-marijuana cards. (Gerson admitted, until it can be purchased in other states and countries, he’s fine with helping people DIY it at home. Kind of a poor man’s version of Foria.)
But more importantly, Gerson was fixated on the idea that there were no products out there to help women who can’t orgasm—women who feel like pleasure is an issue and can’t even relax during sex to get there. For a sex-obsessed culture, we are juvenile when it comes to actually conversing about pleasure, our bodies, and how to get off. Viagra and Cialis exist because men can keep impregnating until they are old as fuck. Women hit menopause, and their sexual pleasure becomes irrelevant to their health. It makes me want to scream when I think about some women who have never had an orgasm.
Gerson set me up with enough Foria to get my vagina super stoned, and I thanked him generously.
“I’m going on a much-needed vacation,” he said. “But you can email me if you need anything.”
On the way home, I was curious, and I couldn’t wait. I decided to test the Foria orally first. I sprayed my mouth about five times, and then four more about ten minutes later. Plus, Gerson had mentioned that in their initial studies, women had reported that they got a head high when they sprayed Foria into their mouths, but when sprayed into the vagina, they did not. I wanted to see how strong the head high would be.
I went grocery shopping and cruised home. My roommate had a friend over, so we hung out for a while, and after about an hour or two I realized I was stoned. But not that horrible, immediate, my-hands-are-made-of-plastic-and-my-family-hates-me awfulness I get from smoking pot—just a really mellow, relaxed feeling. I felt light and calm, like the first wave of shrooms before it gets real, or the difference between crushing up an Oxy and snorting it and just swallowing the pill whole. It was a slow-grow high. Maybe pot could be lovely? Like, really lovely.
A close up of the goods
After my oral realization, I shot up off the couch and went into my bedroom to spray Foria onto my vagina. I knew my boyfriend would be home from work soon, and I wanted to give the THC enough time to get my pussy nice and stoned.
I wasn’t expecting immediate results from Foria. Like Gerson said, this wasn’t magic. When his team first started having women test out Foria, they used a huge range of ages; women in their 20s reported more intense orgasms, multiple orgasms, and a full-body experience, while older women (some as older than 70) said it helped them access pleasure they hadn’t been able to get to in years. It was more profound. They were sleeping better. Well, duh.
“You can’t reproduce sex. Like, let’s do those exact mechanics again, and it will be the same. No, it doesn’t work like that, and we have to look at the plant the same way. We have to work within these conditions,” Gerson had said. “So many things affect it… food, alcohol, what’s your relationship to your partner, your mood that day. That’s part of our job—to be OK with that level of uncertainty. People want to know exactly what is going to happen if they take Foria, and I can’t answer that. We try to pose it as, ‘Here’s this group of women who used it and what they reported to us. You might find your experience is similar.’ We are trying to experiment safely with this proven medicinal herb.”
The first night my boyfriend and I banged with Foria, I was already stoned, so everything felt great. He ate me out and got stoned from licking the stuff off me, and it was killer. However, we have a healthy sex life, and I have never had trouble orgasming. My trouble was with pot itself.
I decided to dose my vagina with Foria religiously for a week.
Every morning I gave it four sprays and again in the mid afternoon. My boyfriend and I had a lot of sex and monitored how things were changing, if they even were. Sex was intense. I noticed certain things felt different and orgasms were longer, way crazier, and felt enhanced. When we were just banging the old-fashioned way, I felt it all over in a more focused sense, like everything was working outwards from my stoned little cunt. I mean, without sounding too granola here, it was pretty good, and I don’t know whether that was the mixture of the Foria between my legs and my mouth.
As the days went on, other weird things happened. When I was hiking up in the Hollywood trails and doing sprints with my pal who was helping me get in shape, I suddenly (in the middle of my brutal, exhausting, gross work-out) noticed my vagina getting all riled up. My body was in disgusting pain, and my genitals felt totally turned on. It was nuts.
However, I was more excited to get head-stoned and bang than to just dose my vagina. But wasn’t this still the point? Gerson had this whole theory about how we need to all just slow down and relax, to think about the overall health and wellness in our day-to-day lives, and how healthy sex and pleasure can really play a part in that.
“I don’t understand why the sexual response and the pleasure experience that we derive from our sexuality have been sort of banished into one aspect of our human experience, either with a partner or through masturbation in a very limited function,” he said. “Then we have this huge part of living a well-adjusted happy life, and yeah, our sexuality creeps into that, but allowing the pleasure of sex to inform our approaches to health and wellness seems to make a lot of sense. They are the power centers of our body.”
Orgasms make you happy. We need that pleasure and release. Maybe we are at the point where we need a THC-infused oil to chill us out and force us to do that?
I’m not sure if Foria completely changed my sex life, because my sex life was already pretty awesome, but it did make me realize that cannabis is an aphrodisiac that kind of rules when it’s not smoked from a soda can. Having proper doses and understanding what worked for me enhanced my relaxation, as opposed to that jumping-out-of-a-window feeling I mentioned earlier.
I’m still using Foria. I’m going to keep getting my pussy high. As Gerson said, it’s a slow-grow and I don’t want the experience to end. Plus, it’s fun to fuck when your genitals are stoned!
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