ABSTRACT
Whether we acknowledge it or not, touch plays a vital role in communication and social bonding in any theatrical event. Rogue, a teenage character from X-Men, cannot be touched by others, lest she sap their life force from them.3 Her tactile contact with others must be mediated through a prophylactic, thus shielding the touch of her skin from the skin of others. As a mutant, she is denied the one real human social tool; we know life through touch. Without touch, we can only know the world through distant proximate senses. As a result, her character is frustrated because she cannot know a kiss or the intimacy of love. In the end, she sacrifi ces her special abilities to be able to touch others without hurting them. Touch can send messages; it can comfort, arouse, repel, or seek out. Ancient conceptions of the senses extended touch to vision, seeing, and sound, suggesting that we knew the world by reaching out beams projected from the eyes or nose, caressing the world beyond us with our different senses. We have since proven that we are giant receivers processing all chemical and physical stimuli that our bodies encounter. Some go as far as to say, for example, that touch is our strongest contact:
Touch is ten times stronger than verbal or emotional contact, and it affects damned near everything we do. No other sense can arouse you like touch. We always knew that, but we never realized it had a biological basis. If touch did not feel good, there would be no species, parenthood, or survival. The mother would not touch her baby in the right way unless the mother felt pleasure in doing it. If we did not like the feel of touching and patting one another, we would not have had sex. Those animals that did more touching instinctively produced offspring which survived and had more energy, and so passed around their tendency to touch which became even stronger. We forget that touch is not only basic to our species, but the key to it.4
