Distillations: No Judgment at Social Kitchen 

Mari and I are sitting in the Social Kitchen and Brewery, talking about the nature of female beauty.

We both live in the Inner Sunset, and over the years we've seen the building go through many transformations. It was a dive bar, it was a Mexican restaurant, it was an upscale neighborhood spot named Wunderbeer (I miss Wunderbeer), it was an empty husk ... and now it's Social Kitchen. Almost every incarnation has been better than the last. It's so hard to tell the difference between "gentrification" and "evolution," sometimes. "Progress" and "terrible things" share an apartment.

I pointed her toward John Oliver's terrific takedown of the Miss America Pageant — and the very idea that in the 21st century we would line up women in swimsuits to be judged.

But this isn't just about beauty, of course: It's also about competition. We can't just be happy that we have 50 beautiful women standing on a stage in swimsuits who will, it is fair to deduce, do anything we ask. No, we also have to rank them ... which, when you think about it, might be the absolute worst possible use of anyone's time in that situation. Yes, pageants are obviously a display of blatant misogyny, but there's something else at work here, too, an obsession with hierarchy that's generally not commented upon because we're still focused on all the misogyny. Got lots of beautiful women? Let's figure out who's the most beautiful! What is that?

Wunderbeer used to be a little bit of a meat market. Social Kitchen is not. Most of the space is devoted to tables, which means it's much more of a place where you come with your existing friends, not to meet new ones. And while it's easy for a mixed-drink bar to slip over into "sexy/trendy," it's a lot harder for a craft beer bar: mixology, which happens right in front of you, conjures up images of dazzling nights and gorgeous strangers — while craft brewing, which happens in a vat in the back, conjures up images of sturdy brewmasters who wonder if the suds taste too much of yeast.

Social Kitchen does it all well, and I'm going through their blond beers tonight, none of which make me stand up and cheer but all of which I recommend. "Gentlemen prefer blondes," I joke, and Mari twirls her hair, saying, "but redheads have more fun." She sighs. "Poor brunettes." That's her natural color.

The sci-fi master Octavia Butler once had an alien species declare that humanity was destined to destroy itself because it combines two incompatible traits: We are simultaneously intelligent and hierarchical. This has always struck me as an insight worth exploring, but it's not Mari's issue tonight. She's bringing it back to beauty.

Mari has had a bad run of guys who insisted they were her friends, only to soon confess their love for her, then disappear from her life when she tried to let them down gently. It's left her bitter about beauty ... and friendship. She's firmly in the "if you really loved me you wouldn't disappear when I say I won't fuck you," camp, and that's always made sense to me.

Not that I don't sympathize with Mari's would-be beaus. I crush easily — and it gave me problems until I learned to relax. Hanging out with interesting, beautiful people is a pleasure all its own. Good things may come after, but the experience spoils if you treat it like an appetizer.

I also get easily bored with my own romances, a discovery that has nicely tempered the obsessive quality that can come from being around the beautiful. An artist friend of mine from L.A., Trici Venola, once produced a series called Monsters and Bimbos, in which she pointed out that "bimbos" are pressured to all be exactly like one another, while monsters get to relish in a terrible individuality. Bimbos can be ranked against a uniform standard. A monster is diminished the more he's comparable to anything else.

Trici always admired me, and Mari envies me, because when I walk in a room everyone immediately knows: "He's a monster."

Mari is one of the many monsters who the world treats like a bimbo. She doesn't want to be in a hierarchy, even if she very well might be on top. Perhaps that's why she likes Social Kitchen — it tries a little too hard on the food and mixed drinks for her taste, but it's perfectly relaxed on everything else.