On Monday, Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin (the one with phallic space ships) sent an all-female "crew" into low orbit for ten minutes, pretty much demonstrating everything wrong with 2020s America:
Blue Origin's all-female crew, which included pop star Katy Perry, completed their trip into space Monday morning.
Along with Perry, the crew included Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos' journalist fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, who is also a helicopter pilot.
Speaking after touchdown, Perry said she brought a daisy with her into space, in honor of her 4-year-old daughter, Daisy, whom she shares with fiancé Orlando Bloom.
"I feel super-connected to love," Perry said. "I think this experience has shown me how much love is inside of me."
Sanchez described the trip as "profound," adding, "I was up there and you see Earth and then you know it's completely black, but … we got to see the moon and it was in complete and utter darkness and then you look back at Earth and it's like this jewel."
Perry agreed with describing the trip as a 'journey," adding that it was a "supernatural one."
I...I don't even know where to begin. Fortunately, The Guardian's Moira Donegan did:
Once, Nasa was the pride of the American experiment: a testament to how a society dedicated to legal equality and passionate hard work could expand the horizons of human possibility. Now, Blue Origin is a testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok. Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic. The Blue Origin flight does not make me feel like humanity will reach new heights of achievement. It makes me feel like everything that is coming is grimly predictable, tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth.
But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man.
It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.
Donegan also points out that, after bribing the OAFPOTUS with a $1 m donation to his inauguration and suppressing the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris, the OAFPOTUS rewarded Bezos with a $2 bn contract. Because corruption.
The Atlantic's Ellen Cushing thinks Perry was exactly the right celebrity to go on this "dumb stunt:"
The critics have a point. I’ve spent longer waiting for the subway than Perry was up in space. Space tourism is, at best, folly—silly, spectacularly wasteful, pointless by definition.
Beyoncé likely wouldn’t go to space. Taylor Swift probably wouldn’t either. Going to space for no reason—courtesy of a rich guy a lot of people don’t like—is risky in the physical sense, as well as in the sense that it’s an invitation to get made fun of online. And those two women are serious, careful people. They’re disciplined. They are always in control. Swift’s Eras Tour was a meticulously constructed monument to the singer-songwriter’s mythology—a spectacle, sure, but one less of pop loopiness than of precision logistics. In Perry’s Las Vegas residency, Play, by contrast, she sat perched next to a 16-foot-tall toilet and had a conversation with a giant anthropomorphic lump of excrement. If Eras was a novel, Play was a knock-knock joke. It was a psychedelically moronic piece of performance art, and possibly the most fun I’ve ever had seeing live music.
That’s Perry, though: Always misreading the room. She is, in a word, cringe. For Millennials, especially, she’s a reminder of just how embarrassing we all used to be: earnest, straightforward, unencumbered by irony or internet nihilism. With her, what you see is what you get. She’s a performer. She’s an old-fashioned celebrity in the sense that she is basically a clown.
And then there's this take.
There was a time, not so long ago, when we celebrated the people who got us into space in the first place: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong. And, yes, Valentina Tereshkova. They didn't know if they'd survive the trip. Some of them almost didn't.
But at least Katy Perry "studied" string theory before her trip. And she has a very good tailor.