There’s no one left to decree What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing any more, now that the production of Cary Grant movies has ceased and all fashion magazines have turned into pure advertising vehicles. It’s all up for grabs, is how the Americans would put it. It’s no longer just their attitude to the rest of the world, it’s their fashion statement too.

Now Geordie Greig, editor of Britain’s Tatler (a magazine for the tie-wearing and hair-just-so classes), has announced that ties are vanishing from polite society.

Much as I wish to spare the feelings of my male readers, I will bluntly explain why, if you are not wearing a tie at this moment, you must rush to put one on. Yes, with your bathrobe. For the fact is that the more men are encouraged in silly self-indulgences like tie-lessness, the less attractive they become to women.

I recently watched an episode of 24 in which Kiefer Sutherland was trussed Guantanamo-like (doubtless a typical Fox TV effort to make torture acceptable, dull even), burned, shot with electricity and injected with drugs to collapse his lung to encourage him to reveal the location of a computer chip.

Our Kiefer didn’t cave. But he was quite the mess at the end of it all, exuding unfamiliar fluids at every pore.

Then I saw the Toronto Star‘s spread of celebrities photographed as they frolicked in the city that week. There was Mr. Sutherland emerging from a chic restaurant with a Desperate Housewife wearing a ruched yellow minidress so pretty it made me wish to have sex with her, and I’m not that way.

Mr. Sutherland looked as if he hadn’t washed or changed since the impasse over the chip. Tie-less, shirt untucked, jeans that would disgrace a yokel after hay-baling, eyes desperate and gaping, you could still see the pillow wrinkles in his face. He was a rebuke to . . . something.

And yet some days earlier, Mr. Sutherland, wearing a suit and tie, was positively casting light over the Toronto Walk of Fame audience, such was his beauty. He was with his mother, Shirley Douglas, who was immaculate as always.

You may say it is all right for an actor to look like something one would shrink from donating to Goodwill. But it is not all right for you, Globe reader.

So little is asked of men. Keep yourself clean is about it. When I compare what I do to myself every morning with male grooming, it makes me sick, frankly. Skin care (cleaning, exfoliating, soothing, gooping, E. Lauder perfectioning), hair (washing, conditioning, deep-conditioning, moussing, ionizing, styling), makeup (don’t get me started), fragrance, all that’s just above the neck. The decision-making is split-second.

And then I get to embark on dressage and clothement. Here’s Mr. Greig on getting dressed. “No tie means less opportunity for stains to collect. It is also, of course, one less thing to remember in the morning. What a nuisance to have to wake up and decide whether scary pink, moody art deco or confident scarlet suits you.”

What a nuisance to change one’s bedsheets, to butter one’s toast, to chat at parties about subjects foreign to you, to make love to strangers with their unfamiliar demands, to read that British American Tobacco says it’s moral to sell cigarettes in Vietnam as the lifespan is so short anyway, oh what a bother to be alive at all.

What a prat is this aptly named Geordie Greig. How I ululate to the hell of our respective mornings. Unlike most women, he doesn’t have to alter his entire appearance, personalize the week’s garbage pickup, read eight Web news sites before breakfast and paper newspapers during same, while faking being pleasant, as do I.

The man runs a fashion magazine for rich people named Skanky Twistleton-Fiennes to read in rehab.

And he can’t even pick a tie.

Mr. Greig’s an ugly man to start with. Michael Stipe boasts (boasts!) that he was responsible on his 1989 Green World Tour for starting the mainstream shaved-head trend. It is one that has done men like Mr. Greig no favours.

There are reasons Big Pharma came up with a pill to get women hot and then issued them with stopwatches. One of them is that without drugs and a way to measure success, women don’t want to sleep with men who have identical lumpy heads with cigarettes dangling from a hit-or-miss hole. It’s not a good look.

In fashion, unless it’s Armani, less is not more. For men, anything that will help is more.

Ties a) look like a phallus, thus planting the suggestion that you have another better one down below b) knot suggestively c) add colour and life to drab male suitings d) conceal the male neck which is often unwashed, wiggly and dotted with neglected beard hair e) impress police officers should you be stopped for speeding and f) give a woman a fine phony reason to compliment you. “I like your tie,” she says. She may be lying, but it’s better than saying, “I like the old egg yolk glued to your chest hair under the missing button on your cheap shirt.”

Sometimes a woman who wants to sleep with you will pull you to her by your tie. Sans tie, sans head hair, she’s left with your ear, which reminds you of school or maybe your mother.

I secretly think that most men would look wonderful in smoky kohl eyeliner. But let me win the tie battle first. Wear a tie, or you will shrink as an emblem of your gender. It’s for your own good.