Dickheads (2015)

Some notes:

waitresses and front house staff are not in position of power, and it actually aligns with the thesis of the author which mentions that ties are sexualizing women.

You say that the tie hides the buttons of the shirt, but there is already such a solution for trousers and why not reuse the concept?

You say that ties are good when eating soup. However, they are not all that effective in their current form, not used for this purpose for the last few hundred years, and there is no sense carying it around through the entire day the way cutlery is not part of the men's office dress code as well.

Where I'd agree with you is in doubting the mental jump necessary to discover sexual symbolism in something which might be just a counterweight to otherwise boring exterior.

Not sure I completely agree with him, but it's an entertaining way to look at the world.

You just nailed it.

Soviet schoolgirls wore white floral bantiki in their hair:

https://imgprx.livejournal.net/0af2ae4db14dd86858b9319de7e6b... (note the social distancing sign!)

and at some point I learned of a russian berry or floret with a spherical form that was white while immature but turned red when ripe, which had made me wonder about traditional peasant costume colour codings.

[1] and their promises of sweet nothings? (for which "hunter green" floral dresses might be recommended: as with slobber from fifteen hand hunters, it's a colour well suited to hiding grass stains.) Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24130589

Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnoqvRGc7pk (I hadn't thought before about confetti drops in the context of cottonwood fluff.)

The sorta serious bulk of article is about men who aspire to be powerful and little bit about women who aspire the same, so yeah, different periods go aboit it differently.

- I didn't think this observation should be an edit on the original comment.

on edit: changed per-modern to pre-modern.

- clean-shaven, short-haired? originally for the advantage in hand-to-hand combat.[1]

- trousers? originally worn (in the mediterranean context) by dope smoking barbarian cavalrymen.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Sc...

- puffy renaissance hips? originally from the padding worn under the faulds/culet[2]. (anticipating the rise of plate carrier lower class cosplay in 2020?)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b5/e3/af/b5e3afaa3d4b6510263c...

[1] did Kadyrov go from short beard to long beard for religious reasons, or because he's now secure enough as a Border March Lord that he can play statesman instead of soldier? or something else?

[2] "Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell."

The minimalism of uniform makes it possible to notice the subtle differences. That's what a tie is for. It's to differentiate yourself but not too much.

From "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology":

> Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment. Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway,they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.

http://abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf

And "Dead Zones of the Imagination":

> Consider the hegemonic role, in US social theory, of Max Weber in the 1950s and 1960s, and of Michel Foucault since the 1970s. Their popularity, no doubt, had much to do with the ease with which each could be adopted as a kind of anti-Marx, their theories put forth (usually in crudely simplified form) to argue that power is not simply or primarily a matter of the control of production but rather a pervasive, multifaceted, and unavoidable feature of any social life ... Foucault was more subversive, but in a way that made bureaucratic power more effective, not less. In his work on asylums, clinics, prisons, and the rest, bodies, subjects—even truth itself—all become the products of administrative discourses. Through concepts like governmentality and biopower, state bureaucracies end up shaping the parameters of human existence in ways far more intimate than anything Weber might have imagined.

> Foucault’s ascendancy, in turn, was precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that both became the haven for former radicals, and were almost completely divorced from any access to political power—or, increasingly, from any influence on social movements as well. This gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus—the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of social power—a particular appeal.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2....