The Boy

Conventional wisdom has it that in visual culture the female body, not the male, is viewed as the primary object of desire. Germaine Greer argues that until the nineteenth century the image of the female body was not drawn from life but constructed on aesthetic principles. The naked body that was instead studied and portrayed with heart-stopping immediacy in hundreds of guises, most of them to some extent erotic, some of them sadistic, is that of the boy. In exploring the iconic ideal of the beautiful boy, Germaine Greer demolishes one of the last Western taboos. With over two hundred images drawn from the whole history of Western art, illustrating the vicissitudes of the beautiful male - as toy boy, virgin soldier, naked martyr or winged genius, angel or seducer, narcissist or worshipper - they are invited to appreciate boys in all their sensuality, spontaneity and vulnerability.