As Groucho Marx reminded us, what makes wage slaves is wages; and what makes extramarital affairs is marriage. Adultery is as old as the connubial bond, which is to say that there’s something classical about good old philandering, and about the physical and emotional desires that it may gratify. Anthony Weiner’s digital dispatches of photographs are in another category altogether—it’s a pursuit that wouldn’t even have been possible, in any similar form, a few years ago, because it depends both on the technology of the Internet and, even more, on the imaginary connections that arise via Twitter or other social media. Which makes me wonder, in the “it’s none of my damn business” department: perhaps a philanderer today is no different from a philanderer ten or twenty or thirty years ago, but what about people who find that they get a certain gratification from zapping erotic pictures of themselves to strangers? Was this a desire that arose together with the digital technology and media that made it possible? Or were there other ways, in the pre-digital age, that people who seek these pleasures pursued them? I’m not asking snarkily or smarmily; I’m wondering about the effect, on the imagination and the erotic imagination, of technology—and whether there’s something special about a quasi-anonymous attraction through masks, whether at a bal masqué (“Eyes Wide Shut”) or by correspondence (“The Shop Around the Corner”) or by Internet (“Catfish” or “LOL”), which, however, isn’t quite the same thing as the exhibitionism-at-a-distance that is threatening Weiner’s political career.