Anyone expecting this huge book to reassure them with the usual platitudes about WOMEN IN ROCK - that Kate Bush is mysteriously feminine, that Annie Lennox hides in a succession of elaborate costumes - will find themselves shipwrecked as surely as fellow travellers washed up on page 27 of A Brief History of Time. Gender is the key word in the title of The Sex Revolts, an extensive, sometimes baffling, occasionally ridiculous tract aimed to decode gender divides in contemporary music.

Husband and wife authors Reynolds and Press have divided their book into three distinct parts. ("We even toyed with using two different typefaces," they confess, "but ultimately shied away from this gambit as Derrida-esque whimsy.") The first (most exhilarating) premise is founded on rock music driven in large part by overwhelming misogyny. Many of the most innovative and exciting of the rock pantheon, they tell us, have been motivated by a contempt for emotional involvement, a terror of the domestic.

Come on down all manner of rock elite, but bow your heads in shame The Rolling Stones, Guns'n'Roses, The Doors, The Stranglers, The Stooges. Reynolds and Press seek to explode much of the myth of Jim Morrison as Rock Poet and revisit Iggy Pop as a less than an PC-enlightened icon. And certainly few other books can be called upon to question the credentials of The Clash. Politically sound they might have been, but still essentially Boy Rock (they had "nothing to say to, about, or for women"). The book compares them to Thin Lizzy.

This section does however give pause for thought in identifying the authors' motives. Why are Public Enemy, often cited early in their career as vehement misogynists, let off so comparatively lightly? You'll search in vain for 'Sophisticated Bitch'. And yet Nick Cave, for all his use of narrative and character and very black humour, is pilloried. The authors make a point early on that too often great records and apparent suspect ideology go hand in hand. (Think of The Stones' 'Under My Thumb'.) Man creates and thrusts; woman negates and stifles.

The second (least successful) section encompasses, if you will, womb rock; an embracing of the female, the mystical: "a lost state of grace". In this Reynolds and Press locate the great Brian Eno, My Bloody Valentine, their darling Can, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison's "obsessively reiterated Arcadian imagery", and the surge of Techno and Ambient. A point is made, but like the music, getting an ideological handle is a slippery, ephemeral business. It's a listening thing.

The final act is coincidentally the most traditional. The authors are citing the women they see as not simply playing up to the strong woman ideal (like Lennox) but forging a fresh path of ideas, imagery, sound. Thus, Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde, of course, but also Kristin Hersh and Mary Margaret O'Hara, and the contradictory sexuality/obsessiveness of PJ Harvey. (There is perhaps more mileage to be gained here than from, say, Kim Gordon or Lydia Lunch.)

More often than not they are attracted to those performers who no more mimic their male counterparts than confirm industry stereotypes; women who, far from afraid of their own sexuality, deconstruct and flaunt what it means to be female and a musician. In that way, the book is telling us something about gender in rock'n'roll that we either don't see or don't choose to see.

Reynolds has long been held as one of rock's most astute and erudite commentators, and this book, with its non-chronological, occasionally didactic approach, the tossing in of heavyweight theoretical names like Felix Cuattari and Julia Kristeva, certainly can only help justify the claim. But it should be added that this is a book by music lovers. The Sex Revolts was written by people who understand and love contemporary music. It matters to us because it matters to them.

Only a few niggling questions remain then - why is this sort of thing so dominated by rock? Where is that Derrida-esque whimsy on, say, Take That or Kylie? Why is there no discussion of a band like the archly liberal R.E.M.? And why, in such a serious work, is the index so bad? Still, at least it's not simply another feeble-minded CAPITAL LETTERED Riot Grrrl text, and for that we should all try and be grateful.