There is nothing empowering about Katy Perry's journey into space

Katy Perry went to space with a group of women only, aboard a remotely piloted spacecraft measuring about three square meters. She then returned to Earth, kissing the reddish Texas soil with a daisy in her hand as a tribute to her 4-year-old daughter, Daisy. Waiting to welcome her was Jeff Bezos, the founder of the space company that organized this mission which, in reality, wasn’t much of a mission, considering the women were in orbit for a total of just 11 minutes.

Surrounding this journey, essentially a very expensive, and rather underwhelming, PR stunt, was a whole lot of rhetoric, and of course, a healthy dose of memes. Particularly Katy Perry, coming off a less-than-stellar period with a lukewarmly received album release, decided to frame the experience as empowering for women and for planet Earth. We're struggling to understand why.

Space Tourism vs. Space Exploration

First, we need to distinguish between space exploration - carried out by dedicated agencies based on scientific data and aimed at discovering new celestial bodies, better understanding the ones we know, and gathering measurable data - and space tourism, which many see as a waste of resources, a polluting and useless indulgence affordable only to the ultra-wealthy, while the world (and the U.S. specifically) spirals into yet another economic crisis. So, in the case of the Blue Origin mission, an extreme example of space tourism, there’s nothing empowering or helpful for planet Earth. And the fact that the spacecraft is reusable, honestly, doesn’t count for much. Nor does the popstar’s pre-launch statement: "This isn’t about me, it’s about our beautiful Earth. From up there, I believe we’ll realize how important it is to protect it."

Liberal Feminism and Girlbossism: The Katy Perry Case

Even less, in fact, is there anything empowering or feminist about this, unless we consider it feminist just because a group of women went to space alone while the craft was, in reality, remotely piloted by someone else, funded by an extremely (unethically?) wealthy man who, through Amazon, is known for harming both workers and the environment. To top it off, Katy Perry used her few minutes in orbit to stare into the camera and announce the setlist for her upcoming tour, clearly revealing the deeply promotional intent of the stunt, and transparently, but no less offensively, using the feminist cause as a noble excuse to justify goals that are entirely economic. That’s how she’s earned the labels of liberal feminist and girlboss.

Also speaking out against the stunt was Emily Ratajkowski, who said on TikTok: "It’s a parody, it’s disgusting." She then added: "That you care about Mother Earth and it’s about Mother Earth, and you’re going up in a spaceship that is built and paid for by a company that’s singlehandedly destroying the planet? Look at the state of the world and think about how many resources went into putting these women into space. For what? What was the marketing there?" Honestly, can you blame her?