'E's not worth it, dear”

In the 19th century the female nude supplanted the male. But the boy is back - and Germaine Greer's welcome to him, says Mark Simpson

Independent on Sunday 19 October, 2003

In Florence tourists are said to be prone to a fainting sickness provoked by all that great art in one place; it's too much for the poor dears. Perhaps though it is not so much the art that is to blame, as the fact that many of the Renaissance masterpieces on show are of impossibly beautiful boys. Boys are after all very, very exhausting. And the more eternally, exquisitely immobile they are rendered, the more perfectly they are captured for posterity, the more they promise only heartache and backache.

Not to mention headache. As Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It playing the boy Ganymede - originally a boy actor playing a girl playing a boy - argues, it is the job of a "moonish youth" to "grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something and for no passion truly anything..." A complete nightmare, in other words. As a queen in a gay nightclub once confided to me some years ago as I leered at his falling-over drunk 19-year-old pal picking fights with the lesbians and dancing on the stage with his pants down: " 'E's not worth it, dear."

But then, that is perhaps the nature of desire itself; and until relatively recently the "moonish youth" was considered the symbol of it. Not so much love and affection as lust and infatuation: Cupid, Venus's son, was a blindfolded and very much out-of-control boy armed with a bow and poisoned arrow that infected its victims with feverish thoughts. Until the 19th century, when the female nude supplanted the male, and Cupid was transformed from a winged rapscallion into a sexless chubby cherub of dove-like monogamy, moonish youths could make pretty much everyone swoon.

Germaine Greer may or may not be pre-19th century, but boys definitely make her rather giddy. Perhaps someone should have told her: " 'E's not worth it, dear" - but if they had we might not have had The Boy, a high-class scrapbook of over 200 glossy prints of glossy boys, mostly culled from the history of Western art, and divided into chapters such as "The Boy is Beautiful", "Play Boys", "Soldier Boys" and "Boy Bands of the Renaissance" (OK, I made that last one up).

The text is very much more serious and learned than some of the chapter headings might suggest, and is not, alas, written in coloured felt tip; though sometimes it can strike an unintentionally humorous note. On the back cover, above a Joshua Reynolds painting of a long-locked moonish 18th-century youth with eminently kissable lips, Greer selflessly proclaims that she'd "like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys". It's a filthy job, girls, but someone has to do it.

In her introduction, Greer presents an argument that, post-Paglia, post Justin Timberlake - and post, if I may say so, Simpson - is not exactly new: "Most people have accepted without question that women are treated as sex objects, viewed principally as body, with a primary duty to attract male attention," she writes. "Though this is clearly true, it is also true that women are at the same time programmed for failure in their duty of attraction, because boys do it better."

Just in case the male sex should take this as a compliment from the famous antipodean feminist, Greer quickly adds, "This is not good news for men" - well, that's a relief - "because a boy is a boy for only a very brief space." In other words, boys are "programmed for failure" too, even more so than girls. It is the doomed and reckless nature of boyish beauty that is its greatest appeal. Greer argues that art's magic is that it captures it forever - but maybe, I can't help but wonder, gazing at all these swooning pictures, both boys and art lose something priceless and nameless in the process.

Giddy, boyish beauty can certainly produce some very giddy statements. When talking about boyish flirtatiousness, Greer complains: "The erotic interests of girls and older women are seldom acknowledged by the mainstream culture." Perhaps Calvin Klein, Westlife and Titanic are not "mainstream" in Greer's rural idyll, but it's as obvious as a teenage pimple that since the 1980s much of pop music, film and advertising - and, since the 1990s, sport - has been filled with tarty boys directly and very lucratively appealing to females (and males). In the last few decades the media have put boys back on the "sex" pedestal that the 19th century knocked them off. If you need proof of the global, cross-gender, cross-sexual, cross-media appeal of boyishness you need look no further than, er, Kylie's bottom.

But Greer, amorously playful as she is, wants it both ways: over the page she forgets her feminist moan about marginalisation and cannily situates her book and herself back in the mainstream: "By the end of the 20th century female appetite for sexual stimulus had been recognised and platoons of male strippers mobilised to take commercial advantage of it." Adding: "That healthy appetite should now be refined by taste." By Greer's taste, that is.

Fortunately, her taste isn't bad - if perhaps a little on the youthful side. Greer defines a "boy" as "old enough to be capable of sexual response but not yet old enough to shave. This window of opportunity is not only narrow, it is mostly illegal." In fact, this definition, while technically accurate, does not quite hold true. Even before the age we live in now, where boyishness is no longer such a "brief span" and is artificially extended into a man's thirties (or forties in the case of Tom Cruise), the "beautiful boy" was frequently older than we tend to think. The ephebe of ancient Greece, for example, was not, contrary to modern prejudice/fantasy, what would be now considered nonce-bait, but a young man of military service age, that is aged 18-20. In other words, the aesthetic ideal of classical Greece was of the same notional age as many of today's boy bands and much of the England squad. More accurate is the definition Greer offers later: "A boy is a male person who is no longer a child but not yet a man." This of course covers most males today.

Greer's "reclaiming" of the "right" to visual pleasure for women occasionally seems more resentful than joyful: it's as if she doesn't want to join men in the joy of looking but elbow them out of the way. Writing about Hadrian's Antinous, who famously drowned in the Nile, she asserts: "What should be clear is that as the emperor's catamite Antinous could never have survived into manhood." (Whereas, of course, if he had been Greer's catamite his journey into manhood would have been perfectly safe...) The circumstances of Antinous's death are mysterious, and obviously Hadrian's erotic interest in him could not have survived Antinous's arrival at full manhood, but it is by no means "clear" that Hadrian would have offed him instead of just marrying him off.

The purpose of classical "pederasty", from a cultural point of view, was not so much adult male pleasure but turning boys/young men into men. It is Greer the feminist, not Hadrian the Hellenist, who sees adult masculinity as the problem and boyishness as the answer. This is why The Boy is "not good news for men".

It's a boyishness which Greer regards as, funnily enough, rather like her, and also as the key to a "reconciliation of the sexes". As she puts it when talking about early modern attitudes towards sex: "Intense amorousness... is considered an attribute of women rather than men... boys share the female's propensity to ungovernable desire, amorous obsession... Polymorphous sexplay was considered part of the birthright that boys would grow out of as life became earnest... and their lusts harnessed in the service of the body politic." Much better, obviously, that they be harnessed in the service of the body Greer. Forever.

The Boy, a book full of giddy pictures of giddy boys, has its own rather exhilarating, amorous kind of gendered giddiness: Greer is herself something of a Rosalind in As You Like It: a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing with boys.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2003

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