Now Germaine Greer, in a lavishly illustrated new book called The Boy (Thames And Hudson, £29.95), claims that until the 19th century the nude adolescent male was as much, if not more, the focus of interest for artists and sculptors as the female, that images of nubile males pleased the female gaze as much as the male, and that since Victorian times, female sexuality has been repressed and the boy pinup pushed into the closet. 'It's time to get it out again!' she screams. 'By the end of the 20th century female appetite for sexual stimulus had been recognised and platoons of male strippers mobilised to take commercial advantage of it. That healthy appetite should now be refined by taste.'
