When full-page ads started running announcing "cowgirl auditions" to work at a new club in Pioneer Square--"If you can serve a drink, keep a beat, and look good doing it, come join us!"--you could literally hear the sound of panties twisting into ass cracks all over Seattle. This is the city, after all, that made international news when a handful of local clenchbutts decided there was something sexist about a nightclub serving sushi off a nearly-naked woman. Non-clenchbutts weren't much more comfortable with the idea of Cowgirls Inc.; when the new club came up in conversation, most of the clubgoing hipsters I know shuddered.

So I half expected to see a picket line--equal parts feminists and hipsters--outside Cowgirls Inc. on opening night. But the only line outside the new Pioneer Square club was the line of people waiting to get in--a line that stretched halfway down the block at 8:00 p.m. The clenchbutts, it seems, have wised up. Their complaints about Bonzai Pub and Bistro using one willing woman to sex up the atmosphere wound up making Naked Sushi night a standing-room-only event. So maybe that's why they decided to give Cowgirls Inc., a bar that uses more than two dozen willing women to sex up the atmosphere, a pass.

And the hipsters? There were more than few in evidence, but in my experience hipsters only like two kinds of meat markets: the gay ones and the dishonest ones. When it comes to straight meat markets, my hip, straight pals want the benefit of drinking in a meat market--it increases their chances of getting laid on a Saturday night--without having to admit that they are, in point of fact, trying to get laid by drinking in a meat market. And while they can love a gay meat market for its sleazy vibe, they can't abide a straight meat market that's similarly sleazy/honest.

But people--straight and gay--need meat markets. Since it's not kosher these days to hit on people at work or make eye contact with strangers on the street, we need public spaces where, upon entering, you're giving everyone in the room permission to at least flirt with you. We need spaces where we pour booze down throats and invite interactions with others. This seems especially important in a city like Seattle, where something about the weather or the water causes people to be cold and standoffish.

But, like, how was the bar?

After cutting to the front of the line (thanks, Mr. Doorman!), getting in the door, and grabbing a beer, I found myself drinking in a standard-issue, meat-market straight bar--not that there's anything wrong with that, of course--with a few broad thematic strokes. Along with the neon beer signs, the pinball machines, and the booths, there's a mechanical bull, a collection of bras hanging over the bar (too many to have been discarded by patrons, but no doubt there to inspire women to add to the bar's collection), and an all-female, all-babes bar staff.

Cowgirls Inc. poses a couple of questions: First, are there enough women in Seattle attracted to the kind of straight guys who will ride a mechanical bull in a bar to fill Cowgirls Inc. with enough straight girls to attract those bull-riding straight guys? Without women to pick up there won't be many straight men riding the bar's mechanical bull.

The answer, judging from the crowd when I first arrived, was "No." Standing on the dance floor in front of the mechanical bull, I turned around in a circle and saw nothing but men--it wasn't hard to imagine that I was in a gay bar. Except, of course, for the eight girls doing a line dance on top of the bar. But as the night wore on, the crowd became more mixed, and when I left, the line--which now stretched around the block--was easily half men and half women.

The second question is this: While it's a given that men like to look at pretty women--that's the Hooters recipe for success--will the women in line want to come back to Cowgirls Inc. after they realize the men they're trying to pick up are being served by women who are much prettier than they are?