Winchester’s ‘beautiful boys’ leave Greer speechless

As the author of the Female Eunuch, many would expect Germaine Greer (pictured) to be forever sensitive to the matter of sexual politics. However, remarks allegedly made by the feminist icon at a recent speaking engagement at Winchester College, the Hampshire public school, suggest otherwise.

According to a report in today’s Daily Telegraph, Greer announced in her opening address that she had seldom "…found herself in a room amid so much masculine beauty". The remark, presumably made in the context of her lecture, entitled Shakespeare and the Irresistible Boy, appears to have alarmed one "ultra sensitive" Wykehamist.

The Telegraph reports that when it came to the questions he put it to her that "if she were not a 69-year-old woman addressing a group of boys, but a 69-year-old man addressing a group of girls, such talk might have resulted in great umbrage".

Apparently this fair, if priggish, observation left Greer speechless. Maybe this was why she later turned down a "vaguely mooted” offer to become the writer in residence at the school, which charges fees of £25,155 a year.

However, seasoned Greer watchers will see nothing odd in any of this. In 2003, she published The Beautiful Boy, a lavishly illustrated study of teenaged youths which she said would "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure".