Cultural Studies/Robert O'Byrne: Months before Germaine Greer's latest book was published, plenty of people were becoming mad about The Boy.
The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, without seeing the work, nevertheless chose to denounce it as "sanctioned paedophilia".
In an era when qualified podiatrists can be attacked by lynchmobs and innocent men find themselves denounced as childmolesters by tabloid newspapers, such hysteria should not be unexpected.
Whether Greer's detractors will apologise for their abuse once they have taken the trouble to read her book remains to be seen. But in the meantime, she deserves to be severely criticised, not for writing a provocative polemic but for producing 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".
Well, let us begin with that right and its parameters: is it exclusive to women, or are men permitted to appreciate the same beauty? And if women are entitled to enjoy the beauty of boys, may men not have the same privilege with regard to girls?
Oddly, Greer chooses to ignore these very obvious questions and proposes only that "the boy is the missing term in the discussions of the possibility of a female gaze". She believes that the dimensions of that gaze have for too long been severly hampered. As usual, by the way, the inhibitions of the 19th century are primarily held responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Now there's an original concept.
So who are these boys hitherto denied, but now restored, to the female gaze? For Greer, the archetypal "boy" is defined as "a male person who is no longer a child but not yet a man", an adolescent on the cusp of achieving maturity. Well, any of us can, and should, appreciate such a person, just as we ought all other forms of beauty.
Of far greater concern is the manner in which we express that appreciation and it is here that Greer comes closest to bringing trouble on herself. Writing of the "sexual rights" of boys, she argues that their "speciality is play and mutual pleasuring" before going on to consider a number of works of art, including Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier and Colette's Chéri, in both of which an older woman is responsible for sexually initiating a younger man. The implication is plain, if never stated outright: boys should be permitted to engage in "mutual pleasuring" with their elders. Now imagine the response if a similar proposition were to be made about adolescent girls and older men.
The problem with her book is precisely that Greer doesn't imagine the alternative proposition, just as - although on record as stating that "a woman of taste is a pederast - boys rather than men" - here she is never as frank in expressing her opinion. It would have been better to have declared in her opening pages that, as an object of sexual desire, the boy is best and then gone on to defend this argument. Instead, she flits around the subject through a variety of thematic chapters and with the assistance of a great many writers and artists. However, far from clarifying her case, they only confuse matters further. Aside from occasional references to African and Asian tribal customs, Greer relies heavily on classical Greek and Roman mythology to support her admiration of boys.
Her readers, increasingly confused about the precise place in the hierarchy of deities and heroes of Anchises and Amphion and Acteon (to draw three examples only among those whose names begin with the first letter of the alphabet) are entitled to wonder what purpose is being served by the display of so much erudition since it rarely leads to any conclusions.
Worse, her analysis of boys in painting and sculpture rarely rises above the level of a first-year art history student in its over-dependence on describing the specific features of the work under consideration ("Behind Psyche stands a figure of Modesty who reveals her own naked body . . .").
All rather unnecessary stuff, as the publishers have done such a good job reproducing more than 200 of these works of art in splendid colour. And while boys in photographs are briefly mentioned, their place in cinema is ignored entirely - an omission made particularly striking by the reproduction on the book's cover of a portrait of actor Bjorn Andresen (Tadzio in Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice). Then there are the textual anachronisms - Phaedra described as watching Hippolytus "as he worked out, stark naked" - the muddled writing which has Michelangelo deriving inspiration for his sculpture, The Dying Slave, from a work usually known as The Barberini Faun, even though this was only unearthed in Rome some 60 years after the Florentine artist's death, and the regular mention of people and places without their being given any context (not everyone will necessarily know the location of the Piccolomini Library or of which country Marie de Medici was queen).
The book is, in other words, a mess, albeit a handsomely produced one.
Mad about The Boy? I don't think so.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist. His book, Living in Dublin, has just been published by Thames and Hudson
The Boy By Germaine Greer. Thames & Hudson, 256pp. £29.95