Let me begin by asking a question. Precisely what were you doing in the 1970s? Assuming you were around back then, and that you’re middle-aged now, chances are good that you were young and foolish and did a few things you’d cringe at today.

I don’t pose the question idly. As of this week, thanks to the Internet, we know a great deal more about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sex life. A copy of an interview he gave back in 1977 to Oui magazine — a soft-porn publication — has surfaced on the Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun. com). And suddenly everyone is talking about how and where the then-29-year-old bodybuilder did, well, it.

Never mind that this has about as much relevance to his run for governor as my mechanical skills — pathetic — have on my ability to construct an English sentence.

Never mind, too, that Arnold was unmarried at the time, that the interview occurred 26 years ago, or that Schwarzenegger seemed to enjoy teasing his interviewer with his exploits.

We’re still transfixed by the sex life of our public figures, maybe even secretly surprised that they have a sex life.

This has presented family publications like this one with a dilemma. How to deal with the racy stuff? Why, throw it to a columnist.

Anyone who professes to be shocked by the Oui interview is either completely ignorant of California culture in the 1970s or as disingenuous as Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” who professed to be shocked, shocked that gambling was going on at Rick’s Cafe.

In fact, recreational drugs and casual sex were rampant in Southern California in a pre-AIDS era. As one of my colleagues put it, “All of these folks making a big deal about Arnold are the people who were in the debate clubs in high school while the rest of us were smoking dope in Pontiac Firebirds outside Foghat concerts.”

Still, the Arnold interview in Oui is worth reading. Not so much for his sexual exploits, or for his liberal use of a four-letter word, but for an insight into how a 29-year-old bodybuilder was sculpting his image as a hedonist, and how he was manipulating his opponents even then.

In one passage, he talked about how one woman came out naked at Gold’s Gym in Venice, where the top bodybuilders trained. He said the bodybuilders took her upstairs.

Asked whether it was group sex, he said yes and added casually that not all of the bodybuilders were able to have sex in public. He left the distinct impression that he didn’t have that problem.

In fact, there’s a little bit of a European Muhammad Ali in the early Schwarzenegger — brash, outspoken, and much smarter than the stereotypes of his profession suggest.

At one point in a discussion of how often he had sex while in training, his interviewer asked him, “So you believe in writing your own rules?”

“Exactly,” Schwarzenegger responded. “There are bodybuilders who are afraid of indulging in sex or even of playing other sports for fear of harming their bodies. I think that’s silly. What’s the use of building your body if you don’t use it?”

Was he a manipulator, even then, a man with a keen eye for the kind of image he wanted to craft as he embarked on a movie career? Absolutely. Do the details of his sex life matter now? No.

All of us have a past. Maybe we used recreational drugs. Maybe we had strange personal relationships. Maybe our politics were intemperate. Maybe we liked “The Partridge Family.”