I am fascinated by the way designers use the female body. Ever since Vitruvius (who thought Ionic columns were feminine) there’s been an inclination to attribute gender to design. Car designers, for example, always talk abut female radii and, possibly, even female details, although this last area may be more controversial, not to mention tasteless. And surely there are moments in history when masculine aesthetic values dominate architecture and design, and other moments when the feminine gets on top. I give you Mies van der Rohe circa 1958 all thrusting height and square shoulders and Zaha Hadid fifty years later, organic, womb-like, even.

Then there’s the matter of the design of women themselves. There’s an obscure, but rather marvellous, theory in economics known as Kondratieff’s Waves, named after Nikolai Kondratieff, briefly director of Stalin’s Institute for the Study of Business, before he was sent to the Gulag. The theory is that all business-cultural-political activity is on very long sinusoidal supercycles lasting about seventy-five years. So we go from sweet to sour, from fascism to liberal democracy.... And with women, from thin to fat.

It’s not that the shape of women is changing, it’s just that our preferences are. With the recession of the early twenty-first century, curves are back in favour. The cinema and catwalk fashion shows demanded thin women because they move better, or, at least, in a way that suited the camera. Now, different media are liberating our choices.

Of course, there’s an argument about the contrarian chic of having a voluptuous figure in an age of economic restraint, but the truth is actually rather different. Men have always preferred the shapely and inviting Callipygian Curve; the mother-whore dichotomy has timeless relevance. Each needs, of course, a generous body.

All of which, somewhat reluctantly, brings me to Love Design. This is a book about “designers’ works that explore the theme of love”. Given that this is an attractive idea, it is exasperating how dismal and off-putting the book actually is. No contributing editor to ER can be accused of prudishness and nor is there anything even notably transgressive here. I may have no use for one myself, but can see no objection to an “anal toy” in he shape of a forefinger with a release-string like a sanitary towel. It’s just that I don’t very much want to see it illustrated. Not because it is shocking, but because it is boring.

And, never mind all the stuff with heart shapes, there is the matter of the bed which contains “audio memories of past occupiers”. Thank you, but no. And goodness me, what a strikingly dull photograph this bed makes. Now, at random : designery glassware, vibrators, variations on the traditional love-seat, chocolate nipples, ceramic nipples. A peach dissected in a way reminiscent of the fig in Women in Love. Seen that one before.

Then there is the multi-lingual text. It may read better in the German or Spanish, but in English the following does not make sense or give confidence : “When love feminised, sexually changed and designers began to experiment with new kinds of androgynous tools for self-development , physical independence and autonomous choice”.

If I had read this book when I was sixteen it would have deterred me from both love and design. That’s really quite something.

Love Design. Published by daab press, £39.95, 384 pp, ISBN 978-3866540514.