No sex/no nudity fetish salons represent a gray area in the tricky legalities of sex work. They are not, strictly speaking, against the law, but they could be interpreted as such, given a cop and the right situation.

When an insider first divulged that the application of lipstick was a popular fetish, I assumed he was joking. He told me to do an online search if I needed convincing: The search engine returned a generous smorgasbord of unexpected fetishes across a continuum of soft-core to hardcore. There were smoking-fetish sites featuring images of women sucking on Salems. There were pantyhose, uniform, jean, latex, boot, fur, gay-male-foot, black leg, upskirt (the glimpse up a woman's skirt as she's walking upstairs or sitting in a chair), lipstick- and makeup application, wet shoes, washing hair, and wearing-clothes-in-water fetishes.

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I was not one of the stoic New Yorkers. In fact, I was not even a New Yorker. But when I got an e-mail forwarded to me by a friend in London, I was upset on behalf of all 8 million of them.

The e-mail, written by a Chinese man, was an angry tirade against America and on behalf of Afghanistan and world peace, written in incongruently inflammatory language. The words "I don't give a shit," referring to the terrorist attacks and the suffering of Americans, stand out in my mind. The writer said that America had brought the attacks upon itself with its foreign policy, that Americans were soft and spoiled, that it was high time they got a taste of their own medicine.

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