The urge to philosophise and strive to understand the deeper truths of ourselves, the world and the universe is as powerful as the urge to have sex. Yet my sexual enjoyment of philosophy was stymied when I realised how irrelevant female sexuality was to two of the greatest philosophers on sex: Deleuze and Guattari.

When I first read Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, I wept at its beauty and laughed at its madness. I revelled in the revelations and became aroused at the possibilities it gave me. I learnt that my body had become two: one body that was organised, oppressed and repressed, as well as another body, without organs. This body is capable of being more than one sex, and to have more than one desire: “an open zone of possibility: desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.” This was a ‘microscopic transsexuality’ that I could access, through the power of my own desire. According to the philosophy I was reading, I could take on another sexual identity, one that subverts the status quo. Orgasm is when desire becomes ‘organised’ or judged, and turned into sexual identity.Deleuze and Guattari’s sexual liberation depends upon untying desire from pleasure, meaning that desire can be free and not caught within the libidinal economy by virtue of where/when it is sated. Orgasm is when desire becomes ‘organised’ or judged, and turned into sexual identity.

Orgasm is when desire becomes ‘organised’ or judged, and turned into sexual identity.

These will take the form of gender categories of male/female, and sexual categories such as gay, bisexual and lesbian (of which you must choose only one). Therefore, avoiding orgasm can allow us to resist sexual definition.

However, this theory only makes sense if we agree that the orgasm is an organisational event, a full-stop. But my orgasms happen in ways that Deleuze and Guattari might never have been able to imagine.