thank *god* for space feminism

or: katy perry promotes yet another billionaire

Why are billionaires so bored? If it's not the ocean depths, it is space. Like, go to a sip and paint class—buy the studio, if you must. Take up pottery, as 127% of my friends seem to have done over the last three years. Start a yoga practice and then tell everyone how you feel since you’ve started a yoga practice. If the preoccupation lies with legacy, then: fund a children's hospital. Donate enough money to a university to have an ugly building named after you. Build a wind farm. Become a beekeeper. Establish an artists' residency program and make sure people find out about it before the application deadline has passed.

People do not know how to leave well enough alone. Because why, dear god, why, would your hobby need to include briefly putting Katy Perry in space? You think that helps your cause??

Screenshot from her post-flight interview.

Perry, famously and, to this day, confusingly present at King Charles' coronation, was one of six women (girl power!) to be shot into space (alas, only temporarily) as an advert for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's private space company. The other five "crew" members of the all-female team: Lauren Sánchez, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe (the only rocket scientist in the group), Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn.

It behooves and pains me to tell you that they are all calling themselves "astronauts" after this two-minutes-longer-than-Ethel-Cain's-Thoroughfare trip.¹ Anti-intellectualism, I fear, is here to stay.

Obviously, this is a win for feminism. That's what they're trying to tell me with the articles about the space suit designs and the glam (the glam!!) of going to space as a woman. You can wear makeup, lose your dignity, and advertise a billionaire's side hustle at the same time. This is a big deal. Where's the town crier when you need them?²

And it's true, it is sooooo important for me, as a woman, to know that were I in possession of half a million dollars, unspeakable levels of foolishness, and no interior life to speak of, I, too, could take an 11-minute round trip to space in a crowded closet disguised as a space pod.³ Inspired doesn't even begin to describe it.

Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Illustrations for Around the Moon by Jules Verne (1870).

Let's discuss Sánchez for a second. She who, affianced to the aforementioned Bezos, was the "captain" of this crew. Let's take that in, shall we, because as a reminder, there was an actual aerospace engineer on this little trip (Bowe), but apparently the leader this crew needed was one who shares a 400,000-acre ranch in West Texas and has dined at Mar-a-Lago with the same president responsible for sending people to a Salvadorean prison without due process. I’m so grateful: who else could so ably represent the interests of women all over the world? I love representation.