Can you Riverdance for me, honey?

Jezebel's takes up a floor in a downtown Manhattan townhouse. It looks more like grandma's house than a dungeon. Clients are welcomed into a traditional living room with drapes and antique furniture, which, says owner Jezebel, "the customers seem to like 'cause it's not scary." She asked her clients in a survey if they'd like to see black leather, chains and whips hanging on walls and the answer, surprisingly, was no.

Jezebel's provides fetish and fantasy, from bondage, wrestling and role playing to the ever-popular foot and leg fetishes. "It's all about acting out fantasies," says Jezebel. "There's one client who buys clogs for the girls and wants them to do Riverdance. He lies on the floor and watches their feet. We get guys who want to look at hairy forearms, guys who like to sniff you. One guy came in with a 30-page script involving he and a girl playing students at a boarding school. There were stage cues and everything."

I ask if she sees any female clients. "Women come in with their husbands sometimes. Usually it's a woman wanting to dominate her husband with a mistress. Women call up and inquire about a session but they rarely come in."

Jezebel sees her business as a niche operation for a high-end clientele not looking for sex, and she takes the no sex/no nudity rule seriously. "I suppose we could make more money if we were having sex," she says, "but we'd also be arrested and getting diseases. It's not worth it."

There are photos of Jezebel's girls on the dungeon's Web site. They are particularly attractive -- like art school students saving for tuition and an exotic trip to Thailand.

So, how has Jezebel's been weathering the recession? "We were slow immediately after Sept. 11 because of our location, but I'd say, in the months after, we picked up and now we're doing better than we were in the months preceding." In fact, business is so good that Jezebel is planning a move to larger premises.

Strip clubs are legal but highly regulated and zoned. Prostitution and brothels are flat out illegal. No sex/no nudity fetish salons walk a fine line between the two. "Fetish houses say what they do isn't prostitution ... They might describe themselves as 'entertainment' or 'service workers,'" says Priscilla Alexander of the North American Task Force on Prostitution. On the issue of where salons fall under the new zoning regulations, Alexander says: "What falls under the zoning regulations is whatever the police decide falls under them. It is all subject to argument in court." The degree to which they come under scrutiny, she says, "probably depends on the whim of the mayor and/or the police commissioner."

Whatever the current mayor thinks of the fetish business, it can be good for tourism. According to Jezebel many of her clients are in town on business, and many from the tri-state area come to Manhattan specially to visit salons.

The no sex/no nudity fetish salon appears harmless, innocent even, in comparison to the seamier aspects of the sex trade, like sex tourism and the international trafficking in impoverished girls and women. Indeed, one could argue that they are not so different from mainstream advertising, which is full of its own, albeit numbingly overexposed, fetishes like long blond hair and fast cars. The principle is titillation, even if the subject/object relationship is different.

So perhaps it's not so hard to understand why someone would rather perform in Manolo Blahniks for an audience of one and make $175 than waitress at Hooters wearing orange shorts and a tank top and make $3.30 an hour plus tips.

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