(Ebook) The Beautful Boy by Germaine Greer ISBN 9780847825868, 0847825868

(Ebook) The Beautful Boy by Germaine Greer ISBN 9780847825868, 0847825868

Greer has made a career of the controversial polemic, most explosively
in the 1970s with The Female Eunuch, brazenly arguing for women's sexual
liberation. Decades later, the Australian-born sensualist seeks to
redress another wrong: heterosexual women's insensitivity to the boy as
sexual object. Considering the utter fetishization of contemporary youth
culture, it's difficult to sustain the argument that nubile lads are
being neglected. But the present day isn't the volume's strength; the
most modern icons include Elvis, Boy George, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison
and Robert Plant-nary a boy band member. The more compelling passages
investigate shifting representations in classical art-Cupid first
depicted as sly aggressor, seducing his own mother, only to be
desexualized in the more restrictive 19th century, conveniently cloaked
by a drape or angel wing. Except for a final chapter that glosses over
the works of female artists, Greer hardly plunges into her initial aim
"to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to
visual pleasure." What does it mean for women to sexualize dewy, girlish
boys created by male artists? To swoon over Caravaggio's provocative
urchins, Michelangelo's languorous Dying Slave or Eakins's
supple-skinned bathers? It's not clear, but then nuance has never really
interested Greer. Short on argument but long on lush reproductions of
languid young men, the collection is better viewed than read. 200 color
and b/w photographs and illustrations.
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