The Beautiful Boy

2003 book by Germaine Greer

The Beautiful Boy is a book by radical feminist academic Germaine Greer, published in 2003 as The Boy in the Commonwealth by Thames & Hudson and in the rest of the world by Rizzoli. Its avowed intention was "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure". The book is a study of the youthful male face and form, from antiquity to the present day, from paintings and drawings to statuary and photographs. The book was the subject of controversy due to its cover photo and topic matter. The subject of the book's cover picture, Björn Andrésen, stated that his permission was not attained for the photo's use. Some writers characterised the book's nature as paedophilic. This includes an analysis of Classical, Neoclassical, and Renaissance art. Pictures and discussions range from Cupid to Elvis, Boy George, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison. She says that male youth was previously prized artistically, but in more recent centuries was displaced by a preference for adult masculinity. Accordingly, she argues that male youthfulness was desexualised in art. She says that, "At the end of the 20th century, guilty panic about pedophilia completed the criminalisation of awareness of the desires and the charms of boys Where once boys were considered 'made for love and loved of all' they are now considered attractive only to a perverted taste." According to Greer, "among the attributes that are on the verge of extinction is youthful narcissism". She also wrote that, "Boy sex is irresponsible, spontaneous and principally self pleasuring". and that they are compelled by patriarchy to "annihilate the boy in him and confine himself to the narrower scope available to him in patriarchal society". She proposes that "[Campaigners] against 21st century sex tourism see the traffic as one way. Their activities are inspired by horror and compassion for children who are forced by economic necessity to have sex that they are not ready for with older people they could not possibly desire. (This assumption itself should cast some doubt on the campaigners' own motives.) When she was studying the 'bad' sexualised mother, the great Melanie Klein asked herself in a note: 'Who is seducing whom? According to Greer, pederastic lust was not what art that depicted young males historically expressed, and that these images were attractive due to being based in life rather than lust.

Reviewing The Beautiful Boy in The Guardian, feminist writer Natasha Walter said that "Because Greer relies on such close criticism of the art, this is a book that is best savoured slowly Greer has chosen to examine her subject thematically rather than chronologically, which means that you are constantly doubling back on yourself, bumping into Cupid again just after you have put away Boy George, which makes it tough trying to hold on to any sense of development across the centuries." According to art critic Sue Hubbard of The Independent, it was "Thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated [but it] does not seem really significant in terms of art history and amounts to a footnote within critical theory. Others of a more voyeuristic bent might feel cheated that the book is rather dryer and less erotic than the title promises." In The Irish Times, Robert O'Byrne said that the book was, " a dreary and muddled text. Indeed, The Boy could be summarised as mad, bad and not worth knowing. Constantly meandering in its approach, the book fails to deliver clearly what Greer has declared at the outset as her intent: 'to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short lived beauty of boys'". A writer for Publishers Weekly said of the book, "Short on argument but long on lush reproductions of languid young men, the collection is better viewed than read." In Literary Review, the literary critic Miranda Seymour called the book "a tasty scrapbook of male beauty". Reviewing the book for Australian Book Review, Ian Britain commented that, "There's little here, in fact, that you could call argument, in the sense of a coherent succession of reasoned propositions: nothing so solid or stable to argue against; nothing so stolid or boring. When not beguiled by the next image of upwardly nubile flesh, sumptuously reproduced from the work of the world's great visual artists, you're more at risk of being left stupefied by the next authorial assertion." In response to Greer's statement in the book about sex tourism, Jenny Diski for the London Review of Books said, "Would it be impossibly puritanical to point out that child prostitution might be qualitatively different from the painful but civilised love of pubescent boys for older women? And does the same apply to older men and girls, or older men and boys, or older women and girls? Sometimes Greer's admirable intellect is subsumed by the need to make a noise in the world. Which is a pity, because she is addressing a real issue here about our inability to be honest with ourselves; a sorry failure to understand the difference between protecting our own socially constructed sensibilities, and protecting children from harm." However, she also stated that "In the meantime, the good news is that Greer’s theorising permits the production of a very handsome book full of beautifully reproduced paintings and sculptures from galleries around the world." In The New York Review of Books, Christopher Alessandrini called it "Part glossy coffee table smut, part art historical treatise on desire" as well as an "out of print curiosity". He also said that "it remains an unusual bit of propaganda calling for the return of young men to the realm of public attraction the claim that beautiful boys are essential fixtures of public life is hardly radical. Western art history corroborates it: How many iterations of St. Sebastian, bound and stuck with arrows, decorate the public squares and churches of Europe? How many likenesses of Ganymede, commissioned by lords and counts?" Greer's publisher, Thames & Hudson, said they did not require his permission to use the picture on the book's cover. The company's publishing director, Jamie Camplin, stated that they had acquired permission from David Bailey instead. Camplin was also quoted as saying, "It's not exploitation, it's the opposite. She's celebrating it, enjoying it. Here's this wonderful looking young man: enjoy it!". She was criticised for these comments, with some writers labeling her a paedophile. She had anticipated that she would be called a paedophile after the book's publication, and was quoted as saying "This book is going to get me into a lot of trouble. I'll be called a paedophile after this."

republished in 2007 .