-by Sailor Mur

When you have a child, they tell you all the emotions you are expected to go through. Elation. Depression. Realization your life will never be the same. Happiness. Annoyance. Despair. But they never tell you about the dirty feelings – not for children, god no, but for children's television show hosts.

My daughter is two years old. I am a stay-at-home mom and freelance writer. Every day my daughter gets an hour of television in the morning while I check email and shower. After seeing the horrors that are Elmo and Barney, I tried to shield her from those programs. I've found that Dora the Explorer and Blue's Clues are palatable for parents to watch, so we usually have the TiVo tuned to Nick Jr.

Here is where the dirtiness begins.

I have a dirty dirty crush on the host of Blue's Clues.

I first saw Steve Burns when I was childless and on a trip with my husband. I was flipping channels in our hotel room when I saw this young guy about my age staring winsomely into the camera. He was thin, with dark hair and eyes, my perfect "type." He stared straight into my eyes and told me how smart I was.

And I believed him.

I was amazed and entranced. I wonder if women in the '70s felt the same way about Bob from Sesame Street, or Louis, the sexy Latino. These men who you could easily imagine encountering in a bar, saying, "What do you do for a living?" and having them say, "I dance around with a felt salt-shaker in front of a blue screen and pretend to have a blue puppy in order to entertain children."

I wondered, at the time, if that would turn women off.

I found out that no, actually, Steve Burns has many many women lusting after him, women like me, at home with their toddlers, who watched Steve and wondered what was underneath his khakis. This made it dirtier; not only was I dirty, lusting after this man who taught children in an oh-so-earnest way, but I was suddenly part of a dirty club. I was not the only woman who wanted this man to close the door of the fake house, take off the green-striped shirt, and get down and dirty with me. Apparently I was going to have to stand in line for this one.

When Steve Burns left Blue's Clues, he was replaced by Donovan Patton. The writers of the show apparently didn't like the name Donovan, so they call him Joe. Joe is taller than Steve, with a cute little smile. He is perky, while Steve was clever. Joe finds things delightful, while Steve wasn't afraid to call them weird. I don't like Joe.

Then the day came when I realized my problem. I was at a party, a lovely party with alcohol and no children, having a drunken discussion with a friend. My friend is also a stay-at-home mom and a fan of Blue's Clues. We had a lively argument about who was hotter: Steve or Joe? I liked the clever humor and slight stature of Steve, while she liked the bouncy, much taller Joe. She said Steve was too short, and I just countered that Joe was too tall. There is no way to figure out who was right, because we've only seen them together in front of a blue screen. But halfway through the discussion, I wondered: How sad were we? Here, on a night where we were able to be away from the kids, we spent the time discussing children's shows and the relative hotness of the hosts.

My daughter received tickets to the live Blue's Clues show for her birthday, so I took her. The actor was not Joe, but he looked enough like him to fool the kids. Lots of singing and dancing under hot lights made him sweat a bit, and I had to admit I wondered who was backstage with the lucky job of toweling him off.

Man, I felt dirty.

The crush remained, to my embarrassment, and I continued to TiVo Blue's Clues even after my daughter started to show a preference for Dora the Explorer. I started looking to other shows to satisfy my need.

There's a new show on Nick Jr., a show about a little girl with ridiculous pink hair moving to a town where no one participates in physical activity. They figured naming the show "Cleveland" wouldn't sell, so they called it LazyTown. It stars three humans and several freaky puppets. The humans are the pink-haired girl, the villainous guy (whose name escapes me because he is not hot enough to remember), and the hero, Sporticus.

Sporticus is an extremely buff man who drives a blimp around and is on call whenever LazyTown is having a problem, usually due to the non-hot villain. Sporticus has a French accent and does lots of flips and jumps. Anyone who sits extra-close to the TV during men's gymnastics, watching the biceps flex and the gluteus maximus tighten, can't help but enjoy the vapid thirty minutes of force-fed eat-right-and-exercise propaganda in hopes of seeing Sporticus flip and flex his way to teaching the puppets of LazyTown healthier ways of living.

Sporticus's actor's name is Magnus. Damn, how hot is that? I discovered that Magnus is the brains behind the show, the producer, the director, and I bet he's the key grip and best boy. Best boy. Definitely.

Dirty dirty dirty.

It was then that I realized the grand plan. The studio execs mean to do this. They mean to hire hosts who will turn on the mothers, keep them interested, make them more likely to watch the show and buy the advertisers' toys. Women wouldn't do bring in as much interest; female hosts would get very few of the mothers watching hot. This is annoying, realizing that this marketing tactic works so damn well.

There are some shows that backfire, at least for me. When you put a number of men together, like The Wiggles, it simply gets fucking creepy. A bunch of men joyously singing and dancing around together for children is so gay that it's looped back around to extremely straight. It's not even gay anymore. Gay men would be better dancers, for one, not to mention better dressers. Queer Eye would have to get their claws into The Wiggles before I would stoop to watching them. Queer Eye is another crush show, but that's another topic.

Is this what I'm doomed to experience as my daughter grows up? Will I notice that the dads on the shows she watches are hunkier than most dads I will encounter at PTA meetings? Am I going to go into her room while she's away to look longingly at her teen idol posters? When I visit her in college, will I use the visits as an excuse to troll the campus for sexy goth nihilists (I never went for the frat boys)?

For the record, I still find actors on shows that are geared for adults sexy. I would do almost any of the men in Lost, for example, and the guys on the first two CSI shows would not be kicked out of my bed for eating crackers. But those childrens' show actors are a special kind of hot. A dirty kind of hot. And damn me, I'm all for it.

End note: I need to emphasize that the sexual fantasy is purely for the adult male hosts of the shows. I'm dirty, not sick.