My Obsession with Ties

Cross Posted on my blog There’s More to This Than Waves

Neckties I mean.

As some of you may know one of my friends and I started what we call NeckTie Tuesday . Basically the premise is that on Tuesdays you wear a necktie to question the gendered (and classed) representation of it.

Necktie Tuesday was started because of a coincidence. Both my friend and I decided to wear a tie on the same day. So then we decided that through ties and looking awesome we could start a feminist revolution. Of course we were really only expecting a total of 7 people to join. To our surprise we have over 30 members on our Facebook group. Not many but it’s a start.

The thing that I noticed about my friend and I is that we tend to be much more confident while wearing ties. Like having that thing around our neck makes us a little more likely to say what we are thinking. It actually gives me so much confidence that I have been wearing them to my exams.

So this raised the question. Why? Why does it give us this confidence? What about that piece of fabric is powerful?

For me ties have always been a gendered thing. Only men wore ties. Women were to wear dresses (much to my mother’s dislike I refuse to do that anymore). When I think about ties I generally end up thinking about powerful, rich, white men who get to do or say whatever they want to. So to me by putting on a tie it’s like I get to indulge in a little bit of the power and confidence not normally afforded to me.

Maybe it just ends up gendering the tie even more.

But in the end I think that even when I take off the tie, even if I’m not noticed as much I still get to say what I want to and sometimes I am even heard.