Following the Femme Fatale, Camille Paglia spends the second largest amount of pages writing about the Beautiful Boy sexual persona. It is a very common one in many places and times but only very recently has it become taboo in western culture. As the name suggest, the beautiful boy really is an adolescent boy just before the ability to grow a beard when physically he is closer to a prepubescent girl than a man. “The Greeks saw [adolescence] and formalized it in art. Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescents in a way that today brings the police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think. I agree with Bruce Benderson that children can and do choose. The adolescent male, one step over puberty, is dreamy and removed, oscillating between vigor and languor. He is a girl-boy, masculinity shimmering and blurred… ‘the adolescent in bloom is a synthesis of male and female beauties.’….These days, especially in America, boy-love is not only scandalous and criminal but somehow in bad taste. On the evening news, one sees handcuffed teachers, priests, or Boy Scout leaders hustled into police vans. Therapists call them maladjusted, emotionally immature. But beauty has its own laws, inconsistent with Christian morality. As a woman, I feel free to protest that men today are pilloried for something that was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of civilization.”
The first beautiful boy in art that has survived to the present is the Kritios Boy from about the 7th century BCE. Since then there are hundreds of examples in Greek art history that also influenced Rome and Byzantium. Some images and paintings of Jesus and saints like St. Steven and St. Sabastian are depicted as beautiful boys with beardless faces, hairless bodies with arrows phallically sticking out of them and usually in vaguely erotic poses such as the contrapposto. Most depictions of angels (which are supposed to be sexless), such as the Archangel Michael defeating Satan, are beautiful boys. “Thus there is a direct artistic line from Archaic Greek kouroi to the standing saints of Italian altarpieces and the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals.” Even Shakespeare penned most of his sonnets to a beautiful boy for the contemplation of beauty is not easily dramatized. Some more modern examples of beautiful boys are Oscar Wilde (and his character Dorian Gray), Lord Byron (and his character Don Juan), Billy Budd, and Elvis Presley. Male shaving of facial hair is a tribute partaking in the beautiful boy persona.
“There [in the beautiful boy] the eye took a firm hold over the imagination displacing the ear and created the sex object. The Greek beautiful boy was a living idol of the Apollonian eye. As a sexual persona, the kouros represents that tense relation between eye and object…
“Cults of beauty have been persistently homosexual from antiquity to today’s hair salons and houses of courture. Professional beautification of women by homosexual men is a systematic reconceptualizing of the brute facts of female nature. As at the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, the aesthete is always male, never female. There is no lesbian parallel to Greek worship of the adolescent….Lascivious delectation of the eye is conspicuously missing in female eroticism. Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind. The eye-intense pursuit of beauty is an Apollonian correction of life in our mother-born bodies.”
All things created by men are delusions of power and destined to fail. “The beautiful boy represents a hopeless attempt to separate imagination from death and decay.” Just as men often focus on the eye to the exclusion of all other aspects of beauty so does the beautiful boy, “The Apollonian is a mode of silence, suppressing rhythm to focus the eye. The beautiful boy, sexually self-complete, is sealed in silence, behind a wall of aristocratic disdain. The adolescent dreaminess of the Antinous sculptures is not true inwardness but a melancholy premonition of death….The beautiful boy is cruel in his indifference, remoteness, and serene self-containment. We rarely see these things in a girl, but when we do,…we sense catatonia and autism.” There is a certain brooding passivity and asexuality in the beautiful boy; he is never aroused and never in action; he lacks an inner life. “The beautiful boy is without motive force or deed; hence he is not a hero. Because of his emotional detachment his not a heroine. He occupies an ideal space between male and female, effect and affect. Like the Olympians, he is an objet d’art, which also affects without acting or being acted upon.” The effects of the beautiful boy are death and/or destruction sometimes of himself as in the case of Billy Budd sometimes of those around him as in the case of Dorian Gray. “The beautiful boy is a destroyer….[he] is never deeply moved by the disasters he brings on his admirers, since he is scarcely aware of anything outside himself. His ruthlessness is an Apollonian apatheia [a state of mind in which one is not disturbed by the passions: equanimity], Stoic emotionlessness.” His disregard for others is due to his inability to love others less lovable. “As the oblivious beautiful boy he can fall in love with no one—except himself. What fills him with ‘a strange idolatry’ is his own mirror-image.”
The beautiful boy, until recently, has always been a sex object “an emblem of passage from one imaginative realm to the next” for men and sometimes women. The more effeminate he has become the more decadent the culture. “I accept decadence as a complex historical mode. In late phases, maleness is always in retreat….Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.”
Paglia takes an intellectual detour to look at the horror genre. Starting in the late 18th century the horror novel was invented and later morphed into the horror movie. She claims, quoting Freud that there is “latent eroticism” in horror, “‘the sexually exciting influence of some painful affects, such as fear,, shuddering, and horror,…explains why so many seek opportunities to experience such sensations’ in books or the theater.” Horror is particularly female due to its chthonian aspects. “The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force. The vast audience of the Gothic novel was and is female. Men who cultivate the novel or film of terror seek sex-crossing sensations.” This is one reason for the ongoing popularity of the genre. “Shared fear is a physically stimulating sexual transaction. Freud’s use of the word ‘shuddering’ shows the common area between fear and orgasmic pleasure.”
Horror is rarely done right. What Paglia calls “High Gothic is abstract and ceremonious. Evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. Violent horror films, of the splattering kind now so common, seem to be a most pedestrian taste….Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex—domination and submission—is.” A vampire sucks the life force of a loving willing victim – one in love who would give or do anything for their beloved even give their life. How horrible to see it happen to anyone; how wonderful to experience that deep love and how horrible to imagine changing the beloved person – that is deep love. “Gothic horror must be moderated by Apollonian discipline, or it turns into gross buffoonery.” The vampire acting like a bloody animal at feeding time destroys the intelligence and overwhelming power of High Gothic; in it, like someone in love – you have no chance against a vampire – such a love has to end usually in death. Failed horror turns love into sport hunting where, like soliciting a prostitute, you have a pretty good chance.
“Horror films unleash the forces repressed by Christianity—evil and the barbarism of nature. Horror films are rituals of pagan worship. There western man obsessively confronts what Christianity has never been able to bury or explain away….Nature, like the vampire, will not stay in its grave.” But more than that, horror ought to confront what is missing. We are repulsed by death and especially decay. “The horror film uses rot as a primary material, part of the Christian west’s secret craving for Dionysian truths. The horror film blunders about, seeking, without realizing it, the chthonian swamp of generation, the female matrix. There is dissolution in nature, but there is also fecundity and cosmic grandeur. The horror film is philosophically incomplete, because Christianity is incomplete. Classical paganism had a far more comprehensive view of sex and nature.” What is missing in horror film is the sublime. The sublime is a “withdrawal from masculine action”, “nature overwhelm[-ing] male imagination with chilling fascistic force”, “an invincible Force, which commits a pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader.” “In sublimity and Gothic terror, western emotion opens itself directly to nature, with its ghostly flood of archaic night.” The sublimity of cyclical rebirth, growth and the smallness of man in the world is missing in modern horror movies. With its end directedness (toward salvation or the second coming) Christianity is missing the continuous cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth. Christianity functions as if nature will be overcome—it is an article of Christian faith that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his is kingdom will have no end…. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” This final end of Christianity is a delusion that nature corrects continually but about which people continue to be deluded. This Christian delusion has been the greatest delusion in history and it has inspired the greatest achievements of civilization (as well as the worst). The terror that it might be popped is real horror.