trajectory began with the Athenian cult of beauty and its supreme theme: the "kouros," or Beautiful Boy statues.

Although the Greeks depicted genitalia as small and unremarkable in their art, one could reply, according to Camille Paglia, "that the male nude offers the whole body as a projected genital."

Nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary queer porn photography with its (usually) hairless, taut and tumescent symmetry of well-honed muscles and beguiling, come-hither demeanors.