Germaine Greer: The Boy

Reviewed by ALISON JONES

I fell in love with Germaine Greer all over again when she came to Auckland in September. She was so ... likeable. She always says the unexpected; she delights in good-humoured unpredictability. So it is with The Boy.

The first thing you notice about the book is how lovely it is, illustrated with more than 200 gorgeous images of teenage male beauty - mostly from Western art, ranging from Greek sculptures, through Michelangelo, Botticelli, and touching lightly on more recent photographic images of such luscious young men as Nijinsky, Elvis and Jim Morrison.

Predictably, Greer has been called a middle-aged pederast for her passionate admiration of the young male body. But in her usual brisk style, she overrides the conventions of the fashionably unsayable, pointing out that boys are now attractive only to a "perverted taste".

Recent panic about child abuse has implied that the charms of boys can be "enjoyed" only by the paedophile; paradoxically, visual enjoyment of youthful bodies is both exploited by the advertising industry and considered shameful in polite society.

Greer reminds that, historically, the young male nude was the embodiment of ideal beauty. Rather than rejecting the patriarchal assumptions in this ideal, Greer embraces the idea, showing how the sensual body of the young man was exuberantly celebrated in art.

She obviously prefers the languid in male beauty; her chapter on Soldier Boys ("from time immemorial boys who were fitter for love have marched to war") is full of pictures of rather passive, sword-toting Adonis-types. She includes no grunting, erotic rugby images, though some young All Blacks in action would fit right in here.

If Greer's images are stunning, her text is just as delightful, peppered with observations such as: "Because no one wants to acknowledge the youth, inexperience and vulnerability of soldiers, the commander will always refer proudly to his soldiers as his 'men' but most of the 'men' will refer to themselves as boys."

Greer's book is no coffee-table pin-up collection for ageing women or gay men; it is a serious consideration not only of the representation of male beauty in Western art, but of the joys of male youth, and a lament for the fleetingness of the soft, vulnerable child that is the boy.

The boy is too soon a man, and at that moment he "must agree to annihilate the boy in him and confine himself to the narrower scope available to him in patriarchal society".

Greer's affectionate enjoyment of boys will resonate with that of countless mothers (and fathers) who adore their sons' litheness and mourn its passing. It may be prosaic to confess this, but as a mother of teenage sons, I found this book a genuine balm.

When young men are driving us mad with their sloth and slovenly ways, Greer reminds us of the wonderful things about them - their beauty and sweetness - and the paradoxes they face as they become no-longer boys.

* Thames and Hudson, $99.95, available at Unity Books and can be ordered through other bookshops.

* Alison Jones lectures on gender and education at the University of Auckland.