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 The Guardian, this week, announced that ‘the phallic necktie is an outdated symbol of white male rule in New Zealand’s parliament’: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.
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