About the boys

AAP, January 24 2003

Feminist icon Germaine Greer expects to be branded a pedophile after writing a new book challenging conventional views on child pornography.

Greer, 63, says The Boy, which looks at male children in Western art, is about reclaiming the right of women to enjoy the beauty of boys.

"Everyone thinks the only people who like looking at pictures of boys - and I mean boys, not men - are gay men but that's not true. I, for one, love looking at them," Greer told British newspaper the Daily Express.

"I'll be called a pedophile after this."

Greer, who set the tone of gender politics in the 1970s with The Female Eunuch and went on to attack "lipstick lesbians" and fainthearted feminists in later works, expects The Boy to create controversy.

"It's going to get me in a lot of trouble," she said.

"I just can't let it go. Working on it has been the best fun in the world, because it is a book of pictures of ravishing boys.

"I'd like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys - real boys, not simpering 30-year-olds with shaved chests.

"The snag is that everywhere I turn I find new pictures of outrageously lovely boys and it's too late to get them into the book but I keep downloading them, scanning them and printing them, just in case and just for fun."

There is no immediate publication date.