On Earth, in America: illegally deported Maryland resident, father, and union worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held in the notoriously inhumane CECOT, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, is finally allowed to be seen by Senator Chris Van Hollen after he was denied twice. Peter Thiel’s company Palantir is working with ICE now. The U.S. revokes almost 1,500 visas, many targeted because of their involvement – whether attending a protest or posting on social media – for pro-Palestinian sentiment, further cementing the current moment of McCarthyism around the flimsy pretext of “Jewish Safety” and claims of antisemitism to punish those who are against genocide. Trump continues to threaten to pull funding from universities who fail to comply with his demands to end DEI programs and punish pro-Palestinian students. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visits Israel and tweets about how uncomfortable his dogs will be on the flight, before vowing to bring hostages home. A gutted CDC leaves parents and fans of public health wondering how to handle a measles crisis. Severe storms hit the Omaha area but forecasts were uncertain because there aren’t weather balloons due to cuts at the NWS. The official White House page for Covid-19 now looks like a trailer for an action movie, with the words Lab Leak prominently featured, as a heavily photoshopped Trump walks in between. Wisconsin sees a 1,450% increase in syphilis over the past five years. Another mass shooting. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who has long peddled a very-debunked link between vaccines and autism – said of people with autism, “These are kids who will never pay taxes,” Kennedy declared. “They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” (Here are two great pieces with autistic poets on how cruel and incorrect this is, one in NYT and one in Mother Jones.)
In America, slightly above Earth: Katy Perry sings “What A Wonderful World” while hovering above the atmosphere, in a tube yeeted into space by the second richest man alive, Jeff Bezos. What a time to be alive!
You’ve heard, likely, that Jeff Bezos sent Katy Perry and his buxom fiance to space (ish). It should be noted there were two actual scientists on board, Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguygen (great article about Amanda here) but their credentials did not spare them from the grueling process of having to listen to Katy Perry sing.
Why do I care? Perhaps because I can imagine a time a few years ago where this branding exercise would’ve worked and been seen as a triumph for feminism. Or maybe because it is so cynically efficient at dominating the news cycle at a time when so many other more important things matter.
Unsurprisingly given what is going on here, the blasting of six women into space for 11 minutes courtesy of a billionaire who has created a most efficient form of labor exploitation did not rouse womankind. Or anyone. People Magazine did a helpful piece of explainer journalism about the backlash, noting that space flight at this moment does indeed seem exorbitant, with Blue Origin supposedly planning to charge aspiring space tourists $150,000 per flight. What is surprising to me is how quickly other celebs were ready to say the obvious: that this is a silly PR stunt and not in the service of genuine space exploration, nor is it a win for feminism. Well…No shit.
Chastain is one of many Leading Ladies who has come out swinging at the Blue Origin flight, sharing a Guardian article on the matter which details, “The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress – a spectacle that mocked these aspirations by appropriating them for such an indulgent and morally hollow purpose.” Chastain joins the ranks of other naysayers such as fast food company Wendy’s and Olivia’s Olivia Wilde and Olivia Munn. Em Rata took to TikTok to describe the flight as “end times shit.” Munn said “Is it historic that you guys are going on a ride? I think it’s a bit gluttonous.”
None of these women are wrong. They’re right! It is gluttonous and “end times” – but so is what’s happening on earth. So is everything else. Is that part of the criticism? Certainly—that launching women into space briefly and calling it anything other than a PR stunt undermines the very legitimate realities facing those here on terra firma. But there is something...profoundly masturbatory about celebrities who easily could’ve been on the Blue Origin flight proudly receiving kudos for saying it was cringe. Yeah, we know. Do you want us to Please Clap? That’s a good girl. You’re the best girl. You’d never do cringe PR like that in service of a billionaire. You’re so much subtler babe!
But we don’t care about the real scientists, nor do we care about the real news. News means celebrity, and celebrity means outrage. It means: a harrowingly shallow discourse cycle, feeding our precious remaining brain cells to the behemoth of social media, where our coveted tweets or posts can be further gobbled up for ad revenue while we pat each other on the back and think, we really did something there.
I can’t help but wonder…whether the seemingly misplaced attention focused on the Blue Origin Let’s Yeet Women Into Space Operation was because of Perry’s own tenuous recent history with “feminism” and her inclusion on this mission. If she was not onboard, I have a feeling it would’ve gone by – much like the mission itself – in the blink of an eye. But Perry is a bonafide celebrity, one personally friends with Bezos. By proxy alone, nothing Perry does can be empowering given her deep entrenchment with this milieu – her supposed politics (but she sang at a Kamala rally!) are deflated quite quickly, when you remember that she is not simply a working musician but an A-Tier Celebrity who is surrounded by the richest people on the planet. For fun! And by choice!
Memes proliferated quickly of Katy Perry floating in space, reading about String Theory for her big trip (the shuttle, it should be noted, is automated) and kissing the ground triumphantly upon her return. Many criticisms though, seemed to conflate this mission and Perry’s ongoing misjudgment of what resonates with women today: that is a separate and legitimate critique, but one that makes the “space tourism is needless and wasteful” claims less urgent.
Her buying into the idea that this is important for women in some way seems to echo her release of “Women’s World,” her failed anthem that was also routinely made fun of. I watched the video and again found myself wondering: is this tongue in cheek? Does the video actually represent Katy’s (or some savvy creative director’s) understanding of how feminism has become a brand, commodified, and ready to be sold much like a commercial space flight, as she holds a branded “Whisky for Women” and a bedazzled hammer? It teeters on the edge of awareness – femininity as an image to be sold, her singing about being intelligent while waggling greased up tits, a half-sexy-woman-half-cyborg who takes gas straight to the ass that inches ever closer to a Donna Harraway reality. A comment on the YouTube video says it feels like “an AI feminist song.” Another comment says “the lyrics of the song are clearly designed to promote strong, intelligent, powerful women. Yet the video just shows them reducing themselves to sex objects intentionally and being incompetent at everyday tasks.”
I rather think it’s the opposite: the imagery gets close to a textual reading of what commodified feminism and femininity look like in the age of advertisement. That she must still look sexy and use a thin (and badly applied) layer of satire only serves the perhaps unintentional point of what is asked of the women we consume as products. What is jarring is how bad the music is. The lyrics do read like Chat GPT, but a beta version: “She’s a winner champion / superhuman number one / she’s a sister, she’s a mother / open your eyes, just look around and you’ll discover you know / it’s a woman’s world / and you’re lucky to be living in it (uh-huh, uh-huh).” Empty. Hollow. Absolutely and utterly useless.
Perhaps the branding of the Blue Origin mission rather than the mission itself is what is irritating people, me included. This was never a scientific expedition, it was always an advertisement. This was for people who can afford a ticket to space, people that do not need to be connected to the realities of the earthly world, though they benefit greatly from its continued destruction. The mission was, always, an empty, hollow, and utterly useless advertisement for a company rivaling Elon Musk’s.
For Katy Perry then, this mission is a feminist win, because Katy is a woman, and feminism means her success. For Girl Bosses everywhere, elevation into the upper echelons of socioeconomic society remains a gendered win and not a capitalist inevitably. We’ve left the Girl Boss behind, mostly, but there remains wisps of it floating throughout culture, that maybe – just maybe – if a woman is doing something, and she’s doing it while being a woman, that’s…feminism? (Remember the author of Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg? Yeah she leant all the way in and is full throatedly in support of Israel now. In a long interview with fellow zionist Bari Weiss Sheryl she wonders why feminists are speaking out about Israel, while peddling unsubstantiated claims. She then went on to help create the movie “October 8” (great podcast about it here) which further tries to make the oppressors into the victims. This is the logical conclusion of the final Girl Boss.)
The space flight doesn’t really matter. That’s the point here. And yet it does, as a perfect exemplar of the stark disparities between the priorities of those living on the Earth and those extracting it.
As a long time lover of science fiction, I also begrudge the continuation of the ruinous and exploitative framework tech bros have employed on Earth and beyond. It is not about discovery, it is about extraction of resources. It is about terra-forming (not gonna happen, Elon!) or the need to find a replacement Earth, because they’ve ruined ours, or the possibility of monetizing an entire new frontier (I am a Trekkie) for personal gain. That’s not science. But what room, or funding, is there for science in our world today?
I think also about why I’m reading so much about this. It’s not simply that these women are part and parcel of a system of celebrity capitalism and a gutting of public science that has allowed private space travel to prosper, but also a media ecosystem (Bezos owns the Washington Post) that in the midst of everything else happening in America we (I) can be so completely and utterly taken by the 11-minute space flight, even if that response is engineered to bring outrage.
A photo of my dog:
