The song's radio airplay on the BBC was restricted to post-watershed hours due to concerns that it might promote promiscuity and could be counterproductive to contemporary campaigns about AIDS awareness.

It appears by itself on the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack, and mixed with the second version, titled "Rhythm Two: Brass in Love", on Faith.

A third part, "Rhythm Three: A Last Request", appears as a B-side to the "Hard Day" 7" and "Kissing a Fool" 12" singles, and on the CD version of Faith as a bonus track.

[3] Michael explained why he wrote the track this way in International Musician and Recording World magazine: I didn't want to write a song as such.

[6]Michael admitted that the track was "really easy to do", but it was difficult in the sense that he intended it to be a dance record, so he "had to do something new with it every 16 bars" for the song's arrangement to "hold up interest-wise".

After doing some programming, we returned to the studio the next afternoon, I pressed "play" on the tape machine, the MIDI obviously wasn't right and everything started making these weird noises.

[3]Michael himself had a similar recollection: So what happened was, we were writing a much faster Pop song that I did have in my head, called "Johnny Sex".

It didn't quite work, but it accidentally set the Juno off to a random pattern, which became the pumping noise at the bottom of "I Want Your Sex".

[3] The music video, directed by Andy Morahan,[7] featured Michael and his then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung to emphasize that he was in a monogamous relationship; at one point, he is shown using lipstick to write the words "explore" and "monogamy" on her back, which is photographed and retouched at the end of the video to reveal the phrase "explore monogamy".

Spanish model Gloria Rodríguez Veiga was also used for naked scenes in a way that allowed the audience to assume they were the same woman; these shots are interspersed with intentionally blurred footage of George Michael dancing and singing the song.

In an interview with Mark Goodier, included in the large-format book released with the 2011 remaster, Michael said that he still likes the second "Rhythm" but not the first, and that he distanced himself from the song because its production sounded too much like Prince; indeed, "Rhythm 1", as well as a few other tracks on the Faith album (such as "Hard Day"), features Michael simulating female vocals by artificially pitching up and altering his own voice, much the same way as Prince was doing at the time with his pseudo-female alter ego Camille.

[15] Rolling Stone editor David Fricke described this song as "a new bump-and-grind original that sounds more like Prince's stark, sexy 'Kiss' than anything in the Wham!