This column is about sex.

It has to be one of the most frequent pastimes in the world. When you consider other people engaging in it, it can be disgusting (priests with little boys), odd (Hollywood stars), or funny. Politicians are especially good at making us laugh about it. Bill Clinton’s escapades were hilarious for anyone not married to him. Except for the stricken look on his wife’s face, Eliot Spitzer provided amusement for us as we learned the peculiarities of this hard driving prosecutor/governor ’s tastes.

(Yes, there is a pun there, but I’ve chosen to ignore it.)

Mostly, aside from marveling at the trouble people can get themselves into, I don’t care what politicians do with their sex lives, including lie about them. People SHOULD lie about sex if someone else is asking about an activity that should be private.

The only time I care about a politician’s sex life is if he (usually it’s a he) has been touting family values before he succumbs to the sexual dark side (David Vitter, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich) or ranting against abortion while helping one of his three wives have one. (Remember Bob Barr?) The hypocrisy of these men is creepy, but David Vitter got re-elected to the Senate the last time around, so his constituents apparently have a greater tolerance for hypocrisy than I do.

And now Congressman Anthony Weiner has stepped forward for our amusement, after getting in trouble for sending pictures of his crotch to some woman in Seattle.

Many questions went through my mind about this situation. For one, why doesn’t anyone send ME pictures of his crotch? None of my friends or family members have reported receiving any such photos either. Naturally, I wondered what his wife is thinking about this. But she soon was off to Africa with her boss, another famously wronged wife, Hillary Clinton. If Mrs. Weiner and her husband share important goals, as Hillary and Bill do, then she may stick around.

Finally though, my main question was, “How did he find the time?”

People have jobs, families and neighborhood meetings. They go to plays, parties, lectures, the gym and baseball games. They read books and magazines. They watch TV.

Anthony Weiner must do all these things that other people do and more, since being a congressman is a time-consuming job. So all the time he was doing his thing on Twitter he was shirking some responsibility. That’s what I would care about if I were his constituent.

Have you been on Twitter? I had avoided it because John McCain was tweeting during the last presidential campaign, and I figured the site was phony because there was no way John McCain was interested in tweeting.

But a few months ago, in the interests of research, I signed up for Twitter. I decided to follow one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood. The sentences in this woman’s books are arresting—she comes up with a group of words that contain meaning upon meaning of ideas you’ve never thought of before. What a disappointment to read her tweets. She was in Vancouver and had had a nice time. Then she was in Atlanta and had had a nice time. I stopped reading her tweets because they sounded as banal as everyone else’s.

I never got around to tweeting myself. No one but my husband cares what I’m thinking as I work in my garden or run out to pick up the dry cleaning.

Moreover, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, if it’s still around, are heavily commercial. I really do not want to “visit” a company or a business on Facebook or “follow” them on Twitter or “friend” someone like Congressman Weiner or even my own congressman. But you can find out what the local food trucks are serving that day, which might be helpful to those who are obsessed with what they will have for lunch.

These social networking sites seem to be worth about a decade of interest and then someone will think of something else that wastes people’s time. The founders will have made billions, but the investors will have lost their money. You heard it here.

So you’ve probably realized by now that I lied at the beginning of this column. It really wasn’t about sex. It was about the strange ways in which people waste time.

And in case anyone gets the idea that I’m feeling left out of something in social networking, I want to warn you. I do not want a picture of your crotch.