Recently I was forced to watch several hours of MTV Hits, as a freak encounter with a hay baler had left me temporarily armless and unable to operate a remote.

Eventually the sound of my own screams died away, and as the blood cleared from my eyes, I realized this could be an informative, if traumatizing, experience: I’d learn something of about the youth of today, about their habits and mores, their tastes and fears. Most importantly, I’d learn how to successfully bed them.

What I found was horrifying. Ye, I have looked into the eye of the abyss and seen staring back: the MILF-centric video storyline.
The MILF, from the Latin milfus proclivitus, meaning, “mommy makes me feel tingly, down in my pants,” has been with us for a long time, from Oedipus – the original, if unintentional, MILF-hunter – to Freud, whose MILFing about seriously derailed male psyches for generations to come. But the MILF-obsessed have always been a small subset of the population, the ones sitting alone at the prom, gazing lovingly into a picture of your mother.

These days, though, the MILF Hunter has gone mainstream.

Watch MTV Hits and it’s obvious. Exhibit One: The venerable “Stacy’s Mom” video. This Fountains of Wayne video stars Rachel Hunter as – you guessed it – Public MILF Number One. She undresses while the band sings, “I’m not the little boy that I used to be/ I’m all grown up now, baby can’t you see?” ‘Fraid not, fellas. You may be scraggly-alterna-rockers on the outside, but inside you’re still 13. Say, is that your puberty floating in my pool?

Next up, Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved,” which opens with the lyric, “Beauty queen of only eighteen,” making us think M5 is driving the barely-legal bus to Paradise City. Don’t be fooled! The post-pubescent poontang parading past singer Adam Levine is just a decoy! I will boil this video down for you, thereby saving you the discomfort of another display of painfully earnest “emotion” from these tastefully disheveled “neo-soul rock” genitalia scrapings: “Hey, I’m with a pretty hot lady friend right now, dancing real close-like….WAIT A MINUTE! Who is that fine Mature Honey? I bet she has squeezed a child through her uterus, and that makes me want her…want her BAD. Time to find a rainstorm where I can look poetic. Then she will be mine.”

Sure, maybe we expect this kind of emotional retardation from a band originally named Kara’s Flowers (now, was that written on your high school notebook in glitter, or pink highlighter?), who is produced by the same guy who brought you Michelle Branch and that number one reason to repeal the assault weapons ban, the Goo Goo Dolls.

But the MILF virus has infected our bubblecrap punksters, too! Busted, a British “band” whose photogenic, twenty-something members aspire to look thirteen, catches the MILF express at the “hot for teacher” stop, with “What I Go To School For.” What they go to school for is Miss MacKenzie, a thirty-three year-old middle-school teacher. I know she’s a middle-school teacher because I, unlike the members of the band, recognize the sweet fruit of just-blossoming womanhood when I see it, and that class is ten pounds of fine in a five pound bag. (With perhaps an extra three pounds of underage naughtiness busting out the top. Ha! Busting!) Unfortunately for the girls, who swoon in vain, the boys of Busted have eyes only for the pear-shaped Miss MacKenzie. That, my friend, is a bitter, bitter fruit.

What is going on here? Have the events of 9/11 so shell-shocked our collective wang that the only safety is the comfort of Mommy’s teat? Have these musician’s genitals, already shriveled and small, retreated entirely into their body cavities, turtle-like, at the sharp existential thwack! of the War on Terror? Or is this just another variation of the old, “Yeah, your mom’s pretty hot, but if you take of your bra…well, that might get my attention…” strategy? Perhaps more relevant: Does the singer of Maroon 5 sleep with a blue teddy-bear, or is it pink? (Excuse me, rose.)

It’s impossible to say, if only because I will probably never get to ask the members of Busted, much less murder them.

But that’s all a side show, really, next to what I really learned. I learned that while the scrappy Brit-punks of Busted, the artsy white-soul-meisters of Maroon 5, and the tiny little Fountains of Wayne are out stalking Stacy’s mom, Stacy’s home by herself, with a broken heart.

And in this case, Stacy’s name is actually Hillary Duff.

Hillary, call me.

– CORNELIUS BLACKSHEAR