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