Jonathan Gornall Popular Books

Jonathan Gornall Biography & Facts

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. Critical reception was largely positive towards the book's illustrative value as a photo-book, but mixed towards its textual and theoretical value. Content The book contains some 200 pictures of boys through the ages, and is a history of boys in Western art and classical mythology. 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. Writing in the book's opening pages, Greer says that, "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. 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." She continues by saying that the ideally attractive boy must be "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. The male human is beautiful when his cheeks are still smooth, his body hairless, his head full-maned, his eyes clear, his manner shy and his belly flat." 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". She argues that young male beauty conveys "male vulnerability" and can be "sexualised with impunity", via the "female gaze". She also says that boys are "debarred from phallic power", 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. In her conclusion she says that, "The boy Eros would bring the sexes to a reconciliation, if we would only acknowledge him." Reception Book reviews 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'". Miranda Carter, reviewing the book for The Daily Telegraph, described it as a "handsomely produced, leisurely coffee-table trawl through the art canon, tracing images of boys in art from childhood through adolescence to young manhood, starting with Grecian kouroi and Greek myths and ending up with pop stars." In a review for The Sunday Times, James Hall says that, "At first flick, The Boy resembles a ravishing picture-book for the smart coffee table. But the text and some of the images are pretty incendiary. Alongside famous Old Master depictions of luscious boys (mythological, biblical and secular), we find recent "art" photographs that have been accused of pandering to paedophiles." The Age called the book "an insightful survey of male beauty through the ages and a powerful and radical polemic ... It is occasionally undermined by erroneous statements ... and self-indulgent whimsy that you will find—depending on whether you love or hate the author—either endearingly idiosyncratic or utterly outrageous." In Peter Conrad's review of The Beautiful Boy for The Observer, he said that "Greer's ogling defiantly disproves the orthodox feminist notion that 'the act of viewing is masculine'". Robert Douglas-Fairhurst said of the book in The Art Newspaper, "[Although] she is better at picking fights than constructing arguments, none of Dr Greer's occasional lapses stifles the frisky playfulness of her book as whole... Dr Greer has managed to produce a book that is itself distinctly boyish... Dr Greer's title seems to offer more than a description of her main subject. It also characterises the polymorphous appeal of her way of looking at it." 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 The New Zealand Herald, Alison Jones wrote that, "Greer's affectionate enjoyment of boys will resonate with that of countless mothers (and fathers) who adore their sons' litheness and .... Discover the Jonathan Gornall popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jonathan Gornall books.