On another planet, maybe they feel sorry for Katy Perry. Her most recent album flopped with critics and listeners; her tour isn’t selling; her name is becoming something of a laughingstock in online circles. Her most recent endeavour is the latest in her parade of career misfires: on 14 April, she, along with five other women, went into space on a Blue Origin spaceflight. It lasted a little over ten minutes and had no apparent purpose. Any sympathy that we on Earth might have  had for Katy Perry has been sucked into the cold, unforgiving void of space, never to be seen again. 

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A victory for feminism, right? … Not really.

The spaceflight’s big selling point – that is, what PR interns scrambled to defend the mission with – was that it had the first-ever space crew comprised entirely of women. A victory for feminism, right? 

 

Not really. The whole feminist branding of the mission is marred by the fact that it was operated by Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos – who has a track record of undermining women’s rights. Furthermore, the media’s coverage of the flight (in a Black Mirror-esque moment of irony) overshadowed the Trump Administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies at NASA; mentions of women, particularly women of colour, are being scrubbed from the NASA website. For a mission so focused on feminism and ‘taking up space’, the claims that these women make about making history have no proper weight. 

 

Then again, for people like Lauren Sánchez – a journalist who is engaged to Bezos, and embarked on the mission alongside Perry – such frivolous words like ‘feminism’ mean nothing beyond an Instagram caption or a T-shirt. These rich women will continue to live, distinct from the many other women in America whose reproductive rights are being threatened and who can barely afford to eat. If the mission had been raising funds for, say, Planned Parenthood, I might look past its climate-annihilating side effects; at least then there would have been something to back up all the feminist jargon –  at least then there would have been a point to the whole thing. 

 

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Listen, I’m all in support of a girls’ trip. But Ibiza was right there!

But the mission had no discernible purpose – no research even took place – aside from serving as a vanity project for these women and to let them experience the feeling of being in space. There was no effort to advance, contribute to, or even promote feminist values beyond empty platitudes (such as the team’s name, ‘Taking Up Space’). Listen, I’m all in support of a girls’ trip. But Ibiza was right there! If you have the audacity to kiss the ground after tearing a new hole in the ozone layer, a Ryanair flight would have much the same effect. 

 

While I don’t condone the participation of any women – including Sánchez and journalist Gayle King – Perry’s involvement feels particularly egregious. She gave numerous interviews spewing word salad about how the flight was for ‘making space for future women’ and appreciating ‘this wonderful world’. But when you’re going on a trip funded by a climate criminal, ignoring the suffering of millions of women and contributing to the climate crisis yourself, how are you appreciating women or the Earth? 

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It’s a woman’s world, sure, but only when Perry wants to sell you a CD.

 

Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised at the hypocrisy on display. This is the same Katy Perry who, just last year, released the maligned single ‘WOMAN’S WORLD’, a faux-feminist anthem with panned songwriting and empty empowerment. Most horrifically, it was a song about feminism co-written by a man accused of sexual assault. For Perry, feminism is nothing more than a marketing tool, and even the billing of her spaceflight as the first-ever female space mission is a lie (Valentina Tereshkova holds that title, with a solo mission in 1963). It’s a woman’s world, sure, but only when Perry wants to sell you a CD. Otherwise, it’s a man’s, man’s, man’s world, and Perry doesn’t seem to mind. 

 

The most darkly humorous aspect of the whole thing was when Perry – who’d previously, in a number-one single, sung of finding a ‘futuristic lover’ – sang a snatch of Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ mid-flight. She did this shortly after unveiling a piece of paper that revealed the setlist to her upcoming Lifetimes Tour. What a metaphor for the whole situation: an empty, feigned attempt at making history and ‘taking up space’ that masks a capitalist ideology and makes a mockery of us ordinary folk going vegan and using paper straws. Take that, leftists! 

 

As both a feminist and enjoyer of pop music, I take no pleasure in critiquing Perry. But her activism is so vacant and tone-deaf that it needs to be called out. In the same breath as mentioning her AI-generated vision of feminism, she chatted to Elle about her plans for hair and makeup for the spaceflight. She proudly declared how, while the legacy of women scientists and astronauts is under attack, she’d be putting the ‘ass’ into ‘astronaut’. She travelled in an ironically phallic spacecraft that exemplified how un-feminist this mission really was. What a wonderful world, indeed – shame it’ll burn up soon. At least the memes were good.

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