This paper deals with two unresolved dilemmas in the philosophical literature around sex rights:

1) ‘Sex rights puzzle’: are negative sexual rights compatible with positive sexual rights? (Firth & Neiders, Baselining Sexual Rights as Healthcare Rights)

2) Are sexual rights also rights to sex? (Srinivasan, The Right to Sex)

The so-called ‘sex rights puzzle’ goes like this: negative sexual rights to sexual self-determination are incompatible with positive sexual rights to sexual pleasure, because nobody can be plausibly attributed anything like the resulting sexual ‘duties’ to satisfy the sexual rights of others; the whole idea of sexual ‘duties’ is monstrous, especially in our society that is still largely patriarchal in structure.

Could positive sexual rights be conceivable in a different society, in which sex would be fully de-moralized? This first part of the paper tries to answer this latter question after having analysed the plausibility of the sex rights puzzle, especially in connection with the analogy between sexual rights and healthcare rights, which are the paradigmatic case of positive rights.

In the second part of the paper we try to distinguish between sex rights and rights to sex, in order to avoid the following conclusion: that because there is no such thing as a right to sex, there are no sex rights. We try to make room for both of the two following considerations that are independently plausible but jointly not obvious: that, on the one hand, people living with disability have genuine sexual needs that call for respect and satisfaction – and that consent considerations don’t always trump those needs as rights.

And, on the other hand, there is the simple idea that in a minimalist feminist society people can not have the right to have sex with other people. The paper concludes by reflecting on the conceptual links between (1) and (2).