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Understanding McLuhan
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06707_Field_TCUM T272.txt
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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,