Why alpha males don't wear ties

Claire Robinson, in (where else?) The Guardian, this week, announced that ‘the phallic necktie is an outdated symbol of white male rule in New Zealand’s parliament’:

‘The necktie echoes the shape of the codpiece… designed … to emphasise a European nobleman’s importance through his large phallic size. It is arrow shaped and directs the eye of an onlooker down towards a man’s groin.’

Blimey. Newly elected Māori Party co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, meanwhile, refused to wear one in Parliament, referring to it as a ‘colonial noose’. Waititi carried the day. Ties are no longer obligatory law-maker apparel in the happy, Covid-free home of the Bungee Jump and Cloudy Bay.

The kind of men who do like to assert alpha status no longer use ties. They use their unfettered neck.

I am sympathetic to Waititi’s aversion to some arbitrary, uncomfortable shibboleth of the very civilisation which was so murderous towards his people in the recent past.

But the tie as a symbol of male, rather than European, supremacy, is the argument made my Ms Robinson and I don’t buy the idea of the tie as any such thing.