This is from a post I started in 2005.... I really hate neckties....
I found this information shocking I plan on forwarding it to the GB.They will put a stop to this practice.
For over two thousand years - since at least the Quin dynasty - the necktie (or cravat) has been the most widely used, and the mostmulticultural of all phallic symbols. Worn by the personal guard of Shih Huang Ti's terracotta army, by the orators of ancient Rome, and by a succession of dandies, fops, and power dressers throughout history, "the clothe prick" (As Lord Byron was said to have termed it) appears to be nearing the end of its unprecedented accessorial reign. The president of IBM, in a recent e-mail, announced that the cravat was no longer de rigueur for the once impeccably-tied "wing-tip warriors" of the giant multinational. Gianni Versace's latest book Men Without Ties is a runaway success. And now, at the most progressive corporations of New York, Paris, and London, it is quite permissible for men to appear dressed for business with no trace of silk, rayon, or polyester about their necks. What has come undone? Why, after an unprecedented two-thousand year reign, has the most useless, and yet the most fussed over, element of male attire gradually begun to whither in importance?
In 1900, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud felt the urge to elucidate another aspect of the necktie's symbology. He wrote: "In men's dreams a necktie often appears as a symbol for the penis. No doubt this because neckties are long, dependent objects and peculiar tomen. Men who make use of this symbol in dreams are often very extravagant in ties in real life and own whole collections of them." No doubt Freud was only making explicit what had been at the back of everybody's mind for quite some time, and yet his overt analysis did nothing to check the necktie's popularity. In fact, perhaps envious of such a ubiquitous form of menswear, sporting women began to wear the hanging thing. It was reasoned that a staid and well-tied male fashion accessory around the neck would counterbalance the evident feminine provocativeness of knickerbocker suits, Norfolk bodices and culotte skirts which women were beginning to wear in order to indulge in sports such as horseback riding, skating, sailing, and playing tennis.
The generation that began experimenting with neckwear in the 'fifties continued to develop their tastes in the sixties, with the Beats, the Mods, and the Regency Revivalists all taking up fantastically different and varied neckwear styles. Lord Lichfield, the dandy Royal photographer, even went to the extreme of reviving the Incroyable cravat with a huge bow. Said Lichfield: "A man doesn't dress for himself. He dresses to attract the girls.... I have an idea all men dress to be sexy like cock pheasants in the mating season."
French/American linguist and semiotician Dr Christine Nivet is more concerned about the changing phallic role of ties: "Anglophone culture is sexually very repressive, so it is not all that surprising that it spawned such a regimented symbol for virility. As Anglophone women are moving away from neo-puritan feminist ideologies, and the Anglophone men are becoming much less control-oriented, the necktie is undergoing a kind of parallel crisis. We see that the men of Versace's Men Without Ties have an ambiguous sexuality, while at the same time being quite confident. Now, in America, one can sell a perfume for men. This could not be done five years ago, just as businessman could not appear efficacious without a great big dangling tie. Anglophone men are becoming more sure, and less in need of a big display of themselves. For their part, Anglophone women are becoming more seductive, so men do not feel that they have to project their maleness all the time."