SEX AND THE CITY.(sexual behavior in New York, New York)(Brief Article)

After the grief, the relief: Philip Delves Broughton on how Manhattan's heroic firemen are finding comfort under the duvet

New York

THE good news from here is that the firemen are getting all the sex they could want. While the desperate, lonely men who make up Osama bin Laden's shock troops had to kill themselves for their 70 sloe-eyed virgins in paradise, the men of New York's Fire Department need only walk into a bar. The city is awash with thousands of hotties in Fire Department tube-tops eager to help with the relief effort.

Sex in wartime is notoriously clawing, ravenous and available. New York during the past couple of weeks has been no different. Two nights after the attacks on the World Trade Center, I was in Alva, a normally respectable joint on 22nd Street, where all eyes were on four busty women pawing at a pair of exhausted firemen, demanding they sign their straining T-shirts.

Friends tell of women who have been chaste for months or years, depressed by New …