Super Models and Cherubs; Read the Whole Post:) : Marc Gafni

{Y.M} this post, written before your question, I hope honors and addresses your question.

The Shechina’s exile is all too apparent even in Webster’s dictionary. Webster’s defines erotic as “tending to arouse sexual love or desire.” The sentence would be perfect without the word “sexual.” In the secret of the cherubs, sex always points beyond itself.

Sex is a kind of meditative practice for the common man. It is that area of his life which most clearly points beyond itself to something higher.

Paradoxically the place that understands this erotic secret well is the world of advertising. Even when television is bland and insipid, advertising is often erotic. Now we all realized long ago that advertising uses the sexual as a primary tool in its campaigns. Somehow we are meant to associate the beautiful woman and the sleek car.

Moralists often accuse the advertisers of a great moral wrong in this kind of advertising. After all there seems to be a false suggestion that we will somehow get the girl if we buy the car. Moralists however often seem to think the rest of us are not so bright. I think we have all figured out that the girl does not come with the car. Rather, the implication is far more subtle.

On some level this kind of advertisement actually intuits the secret of the cherubs. The profound implication of the girl/car nexus is that the sexual eros expressed by the girl models the kind of eros the driver wants in his means of transportation. That is a profound and true idea and it is what drives much of advertising.

It is perhaps more than a telling coincidence of language that these glamorous women are called models. An obvious shoe-in for our theme! For essentially they are illustrators of the metaphysical (and physical) fact that sex models the erotic. Their sexual allure is used to pull at the erotic strings of our soul. When we buy into the ad we are chasing not the sex it displays, but the eros modeled there, the eros we so deeply if subconsciously quest after. Models then become a handy visual and linguistic reminder of the fact that all I am really after is some good eros.

Mind the Gap

The Gap’s ad campaign in fall 2001 shows slender stylish young ladies, with a caption underneath that says, ‘My First Love’. The reader/gazer/consumer expects some sexually provocative image or story to follow. Then comes the wonderful twist that makes this ad stand out. We see a picture of a woman with a book – ‘My first love – Anais Nin’, or with a tape, ‘My first love – the Ramones’ ….or a photo — ‘My mom’. What the Gap ads effectively did is suggest an expansion of the erotic beyond the sexual to include art, music and personal non-sexual relationships. The ad plays off of the Western mind which expects the sultry story to fill in the blank of what is ‘love’ or what is erotic! The Gap is ever so subtly suggesting that the Shechina needs to be liberated from the mere sexual. You can live erotically in all areas of life.

While we give kudos to The Gap for intelligent, soul-broadening advertising, it is undeniable that all too often where Madison Avenue goes wrong is that it is virtually always not serving eros, but manipulating eros. That is to say erotic manipulation is used to sell us products we don’t need or want. Madison Avenue feeds on our eros-starved soul purely for the sake of uninhibited profit.Mark That is not the exile of the Shechina, for indeed sex and eros are not split. It would be more accurate to describe Madison Avenue as pimping the Shechina — making her a prostitute, selling her wares to support “The Man.”

So in the end two things must be said. Using the woman to sell the car, is rooted in a correct ultimate intution, the potential eros of transportation and movement, eros modeled by the sexual but not exhausted by the sexual. {As we unpacked in depth in a long series of earlier posts.}
Yet madison ave. seeks not to model eros on the sexual but to manipulate the sexual to provide a quick hit of psedudo eros which seeks to paper over the shrieking agony of a soceity which is almost devold of true eros. So the model selling the car while rooted in a vague intution of the cherubs is ultimately not erotic but rather a cheap pimping of the Shekinah, which violates the eros of the Cherubs.