I'm inclined to agree with that actually, being even six years younger than you. Not that I'd make generalizations about "the youth" having bad taste - I'm sure today's youth is just as likely to have good taste in music (or in idols in general) as earlier ones, maybe even more so as they have more to pick from.

But that you would be hard-pressed to find a performance as pathetic by someone as widely popular in any previous generation - yes, that I can agree with.

I'm not sure how widely known Britney was before "Baby One More Time" (Mickey Mouse Club, okay, but how widely was that really known?), and whether she perhaps had a "little girl" act prior to that song. It was definitely her global breakthrough though, and it was a very blatantly sexual take on a "little girl", so I have my doubts about your timeline here.

Your post does suffer from not having seen the video, though, honestly. There have been more obscene performances of course, and most definitely performances that were much more controversial by the prevailing norms of the time. Which one might argue is one of the problems of Miley's performance: that the obscenity of it is not in any way new or groundbreaking, and evokes pity and a strong impression of her being desperate and trying too hard more than anything else. And that does make one think that when it comes to sex, the pornification of Western society doesn't really have too much further to go - what does it take to be really controversial nowadays, at least in sexual terms? It's almost easier to get a controversy going by tilting back the other way, than it is through an obscene performance. Although oddly, I think performing in the nude on an event like the VMAs would still be notable enough to cause genuine controversy, even though by any reasonable standard that would be less obscene than this (assuming that the nudity was part of an otherwise normal performance, that is; see Amanda Palmer's brilliant protest song against the Daily Mail not long ago as an example).