If a drunken man has ever leered at you and whispered, "Nice chassis", then you will already know what it feels like to read Stephen Bayley's lecherous, lurching coffee-table "tribute" to the female form.
An art, architecture and car writer who helped Terence Conran set up the Design Museum in the 1980s, Bayley memorably resigned as creative director of the Millennium Dome in 1998 after falling out with Peter Mandelson, claiming at the time that the project could turn out to be "crap".
Unfortunately, no such straight talking features in this, his latest undertaking. He began the book after "a conversation over dinner with my wife", he writes. "She said, apropos of I can't quite remember what, did I think a modern product designer could have handled the complex mechanical, hydraulic and aesthetic problems of the area between the woman's legs?" Instead of responding, "That's enough Mateus Rosé" and asking if they shouldn't get out more, south London's voice of style began to wonder. Since product designers indeed do "quite well on food mixers or bagless vacuum cleaners", and seeing how there's, well, very little on the evolutionary scale between a woman and a Dyson, he "started musing about how the female body evolved". "How on earth could you design such a thing?… But if woman is a design, then what exactly was the brief?"
The result is a rambling and quixotic pervathon that rests wholly on his patronising and flawed central thesis of woman as product. Dominated by glossy images of babes in various states of undress and yet more weirdo questions - "Is there any more potent a symbol than the breast?" and "What do curves mean?" - it is meant, clearly, to be a high-minded analysis of the form and function of the female in art, architecture, archeology and advertising from 25,000BC to the present day. In fact, it is a confusing, ill-conceived and intellectually vacant ragbag of half-baked pensées that reads like Terry-Thomas after a gin-soaked slalom through the Uffizi.
Structurally, there are problems before he has even got the key in the ignition. Insistently taking his cue from an erotic quotation from John Donne, "Licence my roaving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below" - a poem that was "the first in the English language boldly to contain a line comprised entirely of prepositions", he gushes inexplicably - he then awkwardly sets about arranging the first five chapters according to each preposition.
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"Before" is the history of the female form; "Behind", a section devoted to the bottom; "Between", the vagina (or as Sister Wendy primly describes it, "the delta of Venus"); "Above", the breasts; and "Below" - well, I'm not sure what "below" is. The knees? Actually, that chapter turns out to be about nudity and, utterly randomly, cross-dressing.
Clean out of prepositions, Bayley then devotes the second half of the book to assorted babe issues, such as being blonde, wearing high heels, wearing skirts, being a pin-up, being a babe, being intellectually vacant, having hot bazongas, looking like a Coca-Cola bottle, acting like a Coca-Cola bottle, looking like a car, looking like a building, wearing bikinis, um, having a tight butt, having a tight butt that looks like buildings. All of which is delivered in a style that is at best confusing, at worse downright misleading. His innumerable, loosely connected observations often seem pointless, such as the fact that if you turn the number three clockwise through 90 degrees, you're looking at a pair of buttocks (or boobs? I guess it depends what sort of chap you are), whereas an eye turned the other way is - a clitoris, obviously.
When he (rarely) can't think of anything to say, he resorts to absurd, sweeping generalisations. "In cultural history," he writes at one point, "there are good breasts and bad breasts." Huh? A statue of the goddess Aphrodite Callipygos is "the starting point for any discussion of the eroticised bottom", he asserts: another scintillating dinner conversation, right there.
The writing is spectacularly lumpy - lingering on the subject of arses, he explains that the bottom is a "body part that has a trinity of associations: with walking, excretion and reproduction. Plus sitting". So, er, not a trinity at all. Often, he bends history to his purpose. A priapic spread on chastity belts is followed by the disclaimer that they were almost certainly figments of men's overzealous imaginations. The modern dildo, is, comically, a "high-concept device somewhere between jewellery and a personal hi-fi" - a statement that brings a new meaning to a "banging sound system" - and as for the Italian urologist who claimed that high heels might actually give women orgasms, he is chucked away in half a sentence. Bayley is not interested in women's orgasms.
Some of the pictures he has chosen are nice, others a bit tasteless, and yet others not there at all: why train a visual argument on Lucian Freud's portrait of Kate Moss if you don't show it?
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As for the text, it is littered with typos, irritating Americanisations, and some real bloopers - such as his claim that Paris judged the three Graces (gasp), rather than the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Also, I have absolutely no idea why he attributes the Latin word "mammae", meaning breasts, to the 18th-century botanist Linnaeus. The word that Linnaeus actually alighted on was "mammalia".
Admittedly, there are some good moments - a bra's hook and eye is "like the ring-pull on a tinnie of beer" - and he has a keen eye for detail: the romantic novelist and sexual adventuress Elinor Glyn, who invented the term "It girl", usually seduced men on a tiger skin, he writes, but not before she had given them the option to "err on some other fur".
But by and large this is a tough read, with a queasy undercurrent of misogyny. Perhaps he got sidetracked like Chekhov, who, leering at Parisian bar girls in 1887, observed: "I was so drunk all the time that I took the bottles for girls and the girls for bottles." Like Chekhov, Bayley is completely boggled by what's on offer. But at least Chekhov had the excuse of being drunk.
Woman as Design by Stephen Bayley
Conran Octopus £50 pp336