Germaine Greer - The Beautiful Boy NOTES

Read In Preparation Of The PPP And Speculative Edit 1

PROEM

‘Handsomeness is not an aesthetic quality so much as a moral quality’

The same however goes for beauty, used as a signifier of morality throughout art history and up until recently with villains having features misaligned with traditional European beauty

‘The substitution of the word handsome for beautiful when referring to a male is the linguistic sign of an implicit understands that it is wrong, demeaning even, to appreciate men for their looks’

‘Only since the 19th century has it been assumed that the ideal figure that is the subject of figurative painting and sculpture is female. This assumption to some extent has skewed the history of art because female subjects were favored over males by the great 19th century collectors who went on to found public museums and art galleries’

‘Human beings can only understand divine love through the medium of human love, and love of all kinds is made manifest in the figure of the boy’

‘The 19th century denied women any active interest in sex, which was only to be found in degenerate types. By the end of the 20th century, female appetite for sexual stimulus had been recognised and platoons of male stripper mobilised to take commercial advantage of it. That healthy appetite should now be refined by taste.’

WHAT IS A BOY

‘Every male who survives boyhood must agree to annihilate the boy in him and confine himself to the narrower scope available to him in patriarchal society’

The photography of Collier Schorr

In Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti he is turned away, looking back over his shoulder as if to say farewell, his hand is softly pressed to his chest in sadness as if feeling a pang in his heart (a familiar gesture in portraits of young men) culminating in a feeling of change and sadness is this changing, a farewell to boyhood

‘The proper pursuits of boyhood are love, music and poetry, many renaissance portrait of unmarried males show them doing all three’

‘More decorous portraits of noble young men show them as lovers of beauty, with ancient cameos in their hands and figurines of Apollo standing by to signify their fealty to poetry and music. Others have slender index fingers inserted in slim volumes indicating their passion for poetry or for a mistress to whom they have written poetry’

Larry Clark’s photo essays and the films ‘kids’ and ‘another day in paradise’

‘The first shavings from the cheeks of emperor Nero, together with the long curls cut from his head were placed in a gold box ornamented with pearls and dedicated to Jupiter capitolinus’

1960s-1970s theory of the role of sex : ‘Males start as FFs (unconscious and conscious feminine identity) totally identified with the mother, then progress to the FM stage (unconscious feminine conscious masculine) acquiring superficial masculine traits but maintaining their deep feminine identity and to complete their maturation as MMs, developing inner masculine identification to match the surface behaviour they earlier acquired’

- Compare this to the theories of homosexuality from 1880s in Sexual Anarchy

‘Others might want to argue that both masculinity and femininity are superficial, cultural or even arbitrarily imposed and that both boy and girl are more androgynous than the finished product of civilisation, man and woman. It is man and woman who are the subject of gender studies, the boy is all but elided in the various descriptions of manhood in the making which tend to present him as an incomplete man, and entertain no suspicion that the finished man might be an incomplete version of the boy.’

‘It is from his mothers caresses that the boy learns to express affection and how to give and take pleasure. By the time that he is a man he will have learned how to subordinate that search for mutual pleasure for the exercise of dominance. Boyhood is the blessed time when he still remembers how to give and take pleasure without troubling himself about power’

I am unsure about the relevance this has today, it may still have some but it had undoubtedly lost a great part of it as ideas about child rearing have changed as well as the cultural awareness of the implications and unnecessary nature of gender

THE BOY IS BEAUTIFUL

‘So throughly is Apollo associated with physical perfection that every idealised representation fo a young male nude is likely to be given his name’

‘In allegories of youth, boys are often shown with mirrors’

‘All such beautification implies that the boys want and expect to be looked at by women’

LOVE IS A BOY

‘Cupid, with his bow and fiery arrows, is always male and always immature. He is male because he is the aggressor: in no myth does cupid play a passive sexual role. He is a boy because a boy is more sexually active than a man, has more erections, produces more sperm and ejaculates more often’

‘The 19th century replaced the common awareness of original sin with a conception of childhood as both innocent in itself and unaware of the sexuality of others’

What makes a lot of her arguments sound so strange is how the term boy when she uses it can refer to a 7 year old or a 27 year old alternately

‘Though eros is a tyrant and all the Olympian deities are afraid of him, in all his incarnations he is a boy, sometimes a very small boy’

Cartari : ‘Love is depicted as a child because while it is directed solely towards lust, it is no other than a mad desire, and because the thinking of people in love is weak and imperfect, like that of children’

THE PASSIVE LOVE OBJECT

‘A love object is the wooed not the wooer. Whether male or female it is by definition passive, its function not to do love but to allow love. The easiest way to reduce the boy to passivity is to immobilise him utterly in sleep. As he sleeps amorous eyes may feast upon his beauty, when those eyes belong to a woman she is for once powerful and dominant, free to feed her own desire as slowly and deeply as she wishes’

‘Bartholomaus Spranger has angled his ‘Hermaphroditus and the nymph Salmacis’ so that we look along the eye line of the nymph as she spies on the boy who is bathing as innocently as any susannah. The serpentine lines of the desiring female body that lurks behind an upheld mantle dramatise the predatoriness of an intent female voyeur’

PLAY BOYS

‘Dionysus with kantharos, an alabaster figure from Eleusis, accentuates the effeminacy of Dionysus whose legs are draped as if the figure was female, as would also be suggested by the plump curve of the exposed hip, while at the same time its male genitalia are rather coquettishly revealed’

THE FEMALE GAZE

Edward Lucie Smith : ‘Equally narcissistic in feeling is the painting of a young boy on a bed by Lanfranco, the boy himself appears to be a self portrait of the artist, not only because the face resembles other known portraits, but because the picture was fairly obviously painted with the help of a mirror, something which gives a rather different complexion to what might first seem an unusually candid example of a homosexual representation’

‘In 1978, Margaret Walters argued that women are still estranged from their own visual pleasure: ‘but even today, a woman is expected to take a narcissistic pleasure in fulfilling male fantasies rather than in exploring and acting out her own. There is still a rigid distinction between the sex that looks and the sex that is looked at. The dichotomy is bound to breed perversion in both sexes, in the man voyeurism, hostility and envy, and in the woman masochism, exhibitionism and hypocrisy. Both men and women are deprived and impoverished’’

‘Women have now claimed the right to look and to derive pleasure from looking, but the people who capitulate are not men but boys’

‘As a subordinate he might be thought to be feminised, if we continue to insist on passivity as a feminine characteristic. To put it another way, biological maleness only takes to itself phallic activity and mastery when it assumes patriarchal power. The boy, being debarred from phallic power, is endowed simply with a responsive penis rather than with a dominating phallus and can be sexualised with impunity’

This is very much one point of view, fetishistic and limiting to men and women, I cannot really believe that this was published in 2003

Sarah Kent - Male Nude : California (1982)

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