The title of McLuhan’s book reflected his belief that industrial technology had, in effect, mechanized human life as well as the means of production. In this respect, the book also owed a great deal to the Swiss architect Siegfried Giedion, whose book, Mechanization Takes Command demonstrated how everything from 19th century bathroom fixtures to Marcel Duchamps’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase , showed the influence of mechanization. McLuhan particularly resented what he considered industrialism’s baneful effect on family life—emasculating fathers, who no longer practised time-honoured crafts, but worked under humiliating circumstances in offices and factories, and producing domineering women and, not coincidentally, increased homosexuality. His favorite cultural symbol of this state of affairs was the comic strip hero Dagwood Bumstead, who
