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.

My pleasure could happen right in front of them, or anyone, and it would be invisible. I could orgasm repeatedly and still not be sated. Female orgasms are not defining moments of categorization, but an opening up of different possibilities. They are not fully understood by science, or indeed philosophy. They are not understood by men. The folds and unpredictable lubrications, discharges and swellings of the vulva and vagina, that have the power to reshape our understanding of what sex is, can appear at once mysterious and threatening to a system that insists on stability and evidence. This is a pleasure that can be multiple, unlike the categories available for our identity. It is a pleasure that, by its nature, keeps moving forward, even when sated, unlike the orgasm Deleuze and Guattari tried to subvert. Organisation of sexuality clearly needs subversion, but I say this cannot take place by untying pleasure from desire, since it was not my pleasure that was the problem in the first place.

The female orgasm was never the moment at which female sexuality became organised, because my orgasm refuses to be organised.