#40: Bikini's

The Bar

Bikini's. 214 E 6th St A, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 2/15/17 @ 7:30pm.

UPDATE: Bikini's has closed.

The Drink

Shiner. $5.

It's always mildly amusing to me when my standard spiel of "give me the drink that you personally feel shows off this bar the best" throws bartenders for a loop, even if their reaction to my oddball request is perfectly understandable. Some immediately start to ask more questions to get a feel for what they can make that I'll like: this is good. Others don't want the responsibility of having to make decisions at all and desperately try to pass the baton back to me: this is bad. I ended up with a Shiner here, so draw your own conclusions. To be fair, it's hard to go wrong with a Shiner - every one of them I drink reminds me of my college days, like a nostalgia film in a bottle.

The Crew

Travis, Rome, Aaron.

Notes

I have mixed feelings about breastaurants. I have nothing against scantily-clad women in theory, but in practice I that the corporate use of sex appeal is usually just a way to cut corners elsewhere, under the theory that doltish men are so easily distracted by the female form that they won't care if the rest of the product is subpar. Since this depressing theory of male intelligence has been proven correct by essentially all of recorded history, be aware that the same thing holds true here at this bar. Not that it's actively awful or anything, it's just that the equation of More Sex = Better Than doesn't always hold true, and while there's not really anything morally wrong with this kind of crass marketing (unless you're the nominee for a major Cabinet department), it just comes off as kind of tacky, less a playful melding of sex and suds than a grimly calculated deployment of titillation for profit. The word "exploitation" gets thrown around a lot, but it might fit here.

That makes me think, though: under what conditions does adding a layer of sexuality on top of an experience make it better? It rarely hurts anything: adding in nudity to a movie doesn't harm it, as we learned from Seinfeld. Same with the finer arts like photography. But with something like a bar or a restaurant, I'm not sure that upping the titillation factor adds all that much to the experience (Tom Wolfe once had a piece in The Pump House Gang about a restaurant with topless waitresses in the 1960s that confirms this impression). With something like a strip club, you know what you're getting: the nudity is the product you're paying for, and everything else is incidental. At a bar, however, you're generally there for the beer and the company, so forcing your patrons to go through this semi-conscious am-I-allowed-to-be-aroused-by-this-in-public routine is likely to be more distracting than anything else, in addition to raising uncomfortable questions how much sexual harassment the poor servers have to undergo on a daily basis. I can't find any data on if the tips are better, but presumably it's worth for the servers, at least for a little while.

In sports news. we watched enough of ISU @ KU to get into a discussion about some upcoming NCAA rule changes, and then left as quick as we could.