Vade retro, Satana !

Spirit:   What! have you let the false enchanter scape?

    O ye mistook; ye should have snatched his wand,

    And bound him fast. Without his rod reversed,

    And backward mutters of dissevering power,

    We cannot free the Lady that sits here

    In stony fetters fixed and motionless.

-- from Comus, Milton’s masque in praise of chastity

William Blake: Comus

We  noted earlier that the world of the New York Times Magazine, and especially its Style Section, is largely devoted to spelunking the undercrofts of inversion.  Less commonly realized is the fact that their agenda is crypto-misogynist -- an assault on normal womanhood, in the name of misgendered things.   Today’s Magazine scrapes bottom.

Notoriously, the world of haute couture is in the hands of paraphiliacs.  In itself this is of little moment, since it is its own hothouse subculture, far from the lives of the ordinary working woman -- she, that is, that lets the sun shine on the world, while the night-creatures writhe in the shadows.  The problem comes in when, innocently subscribing to the New York Times -- a source of much good and important reporting, let us give them that -- she happens upon such a monstrosity as this:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/scorecard-azzedine-alaia-wins/
.

I once lived next to a girl whose arms looked like that:  the result of polio;  very sad.  But the key point to notice is the head:  it appears to be on backwards.   Possibly photo-shopped, as a sick joke;  possibly the model is possessed, and has yet to meet her exorcist.   A still more disturbing possibility is that she is actually (so far) a normal woman, but the couturier has so slyly set awry the natural lines that should properly complement her innocent womanhood, that she appears deformed.

(For the full horror, scroll down the photograph until the neckline is at the upper margin, and the head is out of sight.   Take in the image.  Now slowly scroll up.)

The worker, wife and mother, stares aghast.   Yet the whole authority of the New York Times, and the Paris fashion world, is telling her:   For shame, your hands chafed with the world’s work;  for shame, your bosom sagging from having nursed your babe.   Don’t you wish that you could Look Like Her, with your pretty head on backwards ?

*

Nota Bene:

I am not entirely funning, in connecting such things with the Satanic.  Central rituals of the Black Mass include reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, and hanging the Cross upside-down.

I once wrote a book called The Semantics of Form.  There is also such a thing as the morality of form; for which the locus classicus is Chesterton’s story, “The Wrong Shape”.

Once Murphy, the noted two-fisted Private Eye, was up against that dark prince ... and he couldn't handle it, not alone ... He had to Call In a Specialist:

Summary and purchase options here:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 5 Aug 2011:]
 Cf. now also this.  The SPCA needs to rescue those bunnies before they wind up like the Gadarene swine.
[Update 16 March 2013]  Too late!  The Illuminati have censored that LATimes story from the Web.  But you can find it if you go to Cached Content.

[Update 15 Aug 2011]:
We have modified the title of this post, towards a more chaste Latin.  You will often see the phrase written "Vade retro Satanas";  but cf. this, from the rite of exorcism:

Crux sancta sit mihi lux / Non draco sit mihi dux

Vade retro satana / Numquam suade mihi vana

Sunt mala quae libas / Ipse venena bibas

Here the form without -s is (as we say in the business) "guaranteed by the rhyme".

For a deep and brooding story on this theme -- the one case that Murphy could not crack alone -- cf. this:  Murphy Calls In a Specialist.