Nicole Teh ’27
Staff Writer
If you somehow haven’t heard, Katy Perry went to space last week — although the definition of “space” is up for debate. Last Monday, the 2010s pop star rode Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceship up to the atmosphere for a record breaking 10 minutes. She was accompanied by journalist Gayle King, filmmaker Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights scientist Amanda Nguyen, and Lauren Sanchez, the fiancee of the man behind it all himself, Jeff Bezos.
If you’ve heard about this, I’m sure that you’re also no stranger to the discourse around the whole endeavour. Leading up to the day, clips from a Perry interview where she expressed her excitement to learn about the “engineering of it all” and claimed that she’d always been interested in both “astrology and astronomy” flooded my TikTok feed.
The comments did not spare her any mercy, joking that it was like she was “interviewing to be CEO after using one click-apply,” and my friends and I admittedly weren’t any better. After Monday, we questioned if we were getting pranked when clips of Perry kissing the ground proclaiming “[she] feel[s] super connected to love” circulated social media. Even the fast food corporation Wendy’s tweeted, “can we send her back?”
While I’ve been lightheartedly throwing these jokes around with friends, I know I’ve only been doing so to cope with the extreme fear I have for the direction this country is headed. This event exhibits a charade of feminism in a time where women’s rights are being stripped. It’s tempting to believe that this was an act of empowerment; however, when the women in the crew were blindly going along with the charade while also bearing the brunt of the criticism instead of Bezos, it’s clear that our oppression is being overlooked and that women are falling for it.
While the cost of the trip overall has not been disclosed, a passenger Blue Origin requires a $150,000 deposit to claim a seat, and they auctioned off their first public seat for $28 million in 2021.
King claimed that like many other critics, she also used to question how expensive the trip was, and questioned why they were using the money on space rather than on Earth. However, after learning that Blue Origin’s purpose was to find a way to put waste into space to better the Earth, she believed in its mission.
However, to me, taking off on a spaceship that depletes the ozone layer feels pretty counterintuitive to “bettering the Earth.” Funding a trip led by Jeff Bezos, a man whose two private jets have emitted as much carbon as the average Amazon employee would in 207 years, is the epitome of antithetical to climate justice.
With this money, we could invest in retraining the workforce to shift towards a more sustainable economy. We could invest in healthcare and affordable housing. Or we could do something else that doesn’t involve perpetuating billionaires’ hold on the economy. When Gayle King, a woman with a loud voice in the media, seems to wholeheartedly believe in her trip or at least says so publicly, it demonstrates how women are falling for this fake performance of feminism.
This attitude marks an era where women have accepted their oppression, and are now falling for façades of empowerment as a coping mechanism.
With the rise of tradwife content on social media and now a female led space mission claiming to be a “huge day for women,” it’s clear women are holding onto any illusion of power that they can grasp. How could they not?
I know how tiring it is to realize that the life I want might never be attainable and I must grieve my dreams. But at the end of the day, none of this is true power. Jeff Bezos’ spaceship isn’t our power, and neither is a performative environmental initiative. Moreover, when the criticism is deflected from Bezos, a billionaire who was seated front row at the 2025 inauguration, towards the women involved instead, we can see how blind we are becoming to the current administration’s oppressive efforts.
I don’t want to completely write off the ride. I teared up when Amanda Nguyen’s mom said “we came on boats and now we are on spaceships,” acknowledging that she’s the first Southeast Asian woman to go to space. I was even admittedly envious of the spiritual awakening Perry seemed to have, seeming more connected to love than I have ever come close to. It is amazing that women can do something so unprecedented, but when so many of us are suffering on Earth, reveling in this wonder doesn’t seem productive.
Until women worldwide have access to basic human rights, can anything actually be a big step for women? We can’t let ourselves get caught in the spectacle of it all, and also not forget who is really behind it.
Women in the United States are suffering, and Katy Perry going to space was catastrophic.
Photo courtesy of Slate.
