Through a reading of texts by Gayle Rubin and following in the footsteps of Foucault, in this article we examine and criticize a sexual hierarchy by setting out what Gayle Rubin calls a “concept of benign sexual variation”. It is also a matter of grasping the way in which this variation of pleasures can work itself free of psychopathological categorizations through the construction of a culture and a sociability around sexual practices and, therefore, of a politics of sex. The articulation between the notion of gender and psychoanalysis shows the surprising proximity of Gayle Rubin to Freud on the question of sexuality and its pleasures.