excitement only for a visual culture that had divorced itself 
from the audile-tactile values of less abstract societies. As late 
as 1930, four-letter words made visual on the printed page 
seemed portentous. Words that most people used every hour 
of the day became as frantic as nudity, when printed. Most 
“four-letter words” are heavy with tactile-involving stress. For 
this reason they seem earthy and vigorous to visual man. So it 
is with nudity. To backward cultures still embedded in the full 
gamut of sense-life, not yet abstracted by literacy and 
industrial visual order, nudity is merely pathetic. The Kinsey 
Report on the sex life of the male expressed bafflement that 
peasants and backward peoples did not relish marital or 
boudoir nudity. Khrushchev did not enjoy the can-can dance 
provided for his entertainment in Hollywood. Naturally not. That 
sort of mime of sense involvement is meaningful only to long-
literate societies. Backward peoples approach nudity, if at all,