“Sexy feminism,” according to Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and Heather Wood Rudulph, “owns the oft-maligned word feminist and aims to show young women how fun, empowering and, yes, sexy it is to fight for women’s rights. We want to help other women find their feminism."

This is an unarguably laudable aim. It is, however, rather difficult for a woman to find her feminism if she is too embarrassed to be seen reading the guidebook in public.

A woman should never be assessed on her appearances, of course; a book, judged by its cover, never. But it is hard not to feel that a feminist tome that uses as a close-up, quasi-pornographic photo of a pair of parting lips on its cover, paired with the subtitle “A Girl’s Guide to Love, Success and Style” is perhaps a little confused in both its message and its packaging. One can’t blame the authors of Sexy Feminism if the publisher’s designers decided to focus on the first word in the title as opposed to the second. One can, however, query the phrasing of their subtitle: “Girls”? Sisters, please.

This illustrates some of the problems with Sexy Feminism, which—incidentally—is not a bad book. It’s not this generation’s The Feminine Mystique, sure, but it does not intend to be and it is not nearly as stupid as the cover suggests. But, all too often, Armstrong and Rudulph bog down their more interesting points in sappy women’s magazine–speak. They make frequent recourse to quotes from anonymous pals (“A friend of ours in Los Angeles…”, “One guy we know tells us, ‘Almost every woman I’ve slept with likes to be tied up occasionally’”), and they gratingly insist that all women are, apparently, the same with their all too frequent use of the first person plural: “We’re tantalized by media imagery that sexualizes food”—are we? All of us? The overall effect is less of reading a book and more of reading a really long article in Elle while waiting for the dentist.

Which is a pity because Armstrong and Rudulph have some decent points to make. Feminism is in the beginning of its fourth wave which, Armstrong and Rudulph rightly say, is defined by “greater media awareness, cultural and sexual diversity.” It is also, I would say, defined by the use of humour (see websites such as Jezebel and books such as Caitlin Moran’s How To Be a Woman) and an aversion to the kind of proscriptive policies that put some women off feminism in past decades when certain leading lights seemed actively hostile to everything from marriage to make up.