If Joyce Prigger is going to run a feminist magazine that encourages women to harness their sexual power, then dammit, she’s gotta walk the walk, too. When episode 4 of Minx begins, Joyce is lying in bed on top of a naked guitarist named Graham (Probably But Not Definitively) Nash (played by Guy Burnet). You’ll recall, Graham was playing guitar at Linda Ronstadt’s listening party and was making goo-goo eyes at Joyce when she was playing the shaker onstage with them. Joyce is smitten with her new rock star sex buddy and she’s not feeling bad about it one bit: that’s the luxury of being a woman owning her high status.

Doug is recovering from the ego blow of Constance discontinuing his Carl Sagan-edited outer space magazine, so he has taken up this newfangled sport called jogging.

“It’s the healthiest I’ve ever felt in my whole life,” he tells his receptionist who’s impressed that he’s gone running three days in a row. In order to impress Constance, Doug (and his new probationary assistant, Bambi) are hosting a very secret, special… something… that they won’t tell anyone about, alls I know is that it involves a whole lot of boxes of merch, and doors open at 8.

After Joyce’s Rolling Stone interview, which helped her realize that she should start embracing the life she’s living and enjoy her power, she’s embodying the confident boss and sexy woman that she is. Maybe a bit too much. When she sees her sister Shelly in the office – who is now a writer for Minx, penning a monthly Bella LaRouche column featuring her own sexual exploits – Joyce goes on and on about her book deal and her rock star boyfriend, and though she asks Shelly where she gets all of her ideas for Bella, she doesn’t actually stop for an answer. Bella is Shelly’s alter ego, but Joyce is too caught up in herself to even realize it, and Shelly’s frustrated by Joyce’s new, uppity boss persona.

Also frustrated by the new Joyce is Richie who pitches her an idea for his next photo spread: a gaggle of men posing in a WeHo bath house. “Very sexy,” Joyce says, but when she sees the storyboards, she struggles to find a way to say “It’s too gay,” in a nice way, so she tells Richie she needs him to put a pin in it and think of a new idea that’s more aspirational… to women. Maybe backstage at a rock concert or something, a stolen glance at a rock star… an idea that is obviously ripped from the headlines of The Joyce Tribune and it’s the only way Joyce can think to let him down easy. Richie hates the idea, so he walks away upset that the one idea he’s been pushing for for months has been rejected yet again.

“Didn’t your mama ever teach you how to turn someone down?” Tina, who has observed this whole thing, asks Joyce. “My mama is a serious bitch. And she taught me that if you don’t like something, you just say no.” Joyce never had that kind of relationship with her mother, so no, she was never taught how to communicate this way.

This is just one of the many life lessons Joyce receives during the episode. When Constance invites her to a boutique for a wardrobe fitting, Joyce explains that she doesn’t need a makeover: these pantsuits are very intentional, thankyouverymuch. “You do not need to dress like a man to earn the respect of one,” Connie says. Power and femininity are not mutually exclusive, and so Joyce wows in a white, one-shoulder sundress that she will eventually wear to a photo shoot where she’s meeting Graham (as well as Crosby, Stills, and Young).

That’s where she realizes she’s just a groupie, one of Graham’s many hot young thangs who he invites back to his hotel room. Jesus, embracing your power and sexuality is no easy task when the men you choose indiscriminately sleep with any girl who plays shakers onstage with the band.

Richie, dejected and vengeful, whips up a new photoshoot that’s a direct shot at Joyce’s new persona. A woman in a pantsuit lies on a couch as a naked man who looks just like Graham, Joyce’s new rock star boyfriend, rubs her feet. “I call it ‘Backstage Ass,'” Richie tells Tina. “You’re at 90% ‘Fuck You’ and you need to bring it down to about 10,” Tina warns him, adding that Joyce will never let this be in the magazine. Richie can’t hide his frustration and what he thinks of as Joyce’s dictatorial style, and if this is how it manifests, then that’s his process, Tina!

As for Doug’s secret project, he enlists Shelly to work on it with Bambi despite the fact that Shelly is still uncomfortable around the woman who sexually awakened her. When the two women finish their work, Bambi asks Shelly if she wants to have sex, and Shelly rejects her advances, telling her they can only be friends.

“That’s okay!” Bambi says. “I love friends. Friends are the family you choose. And you don’t have sex with family. Unless it’s your step-sibling. And even then, you have to keep it a secret because of his political career.” Once again, desperate for Bambi’s prequel series, need to know more.

So what is Doug’s secret project? It’s called Club Minx, and it’s a Chippendales-style stage show with stripping, a very loose, feminism-inspired plot, and an homage to the magic of birth featuring a very cut male dancer as a newborn who emerges from a pink fabric birth canal. (“Am I supposed to find the baby attractive? Because I do,” Connie tells Tina as they watch.)

Doug sees the stage show as the future of the Minx brand, but Joyce, who clearly had a blast watching the show, disagrees. “No one at our level is claiming sexuality and intelligence with equal confidence,” she tells Doug. “This was one of those things, but I don’t see a world where it ever becomes both.” Doug even tries to get Constance on his side, but she defers to Joyce who, taking Tina’s advice from earlier, flatly tells him, “Doug, the answer is no.”

Doug takes Joyce’s rejection hard, taking comfort in Tina, who offers to drive them up the coast to ignore work for a while when she spots him throwing 4,000 Speedos in the trash after the show. Joyce, however, isn’t feeling too bad about the way things shook out: the man in her bed that night is Xavier, one of the strippers from the show.

While it’s nice to see Joyce actually start to feel confident that she has earned her place at the top, there’s a fine line between owning one’s power and abusing it. As Joyce starts to exert creative control over every last detail at Minx, it feels like the show is already planting some seeds of the Minx employee’s discontent with their newly empowered editor-in-chief.