If the ruling class’ proximity to female empowerment could be quantified in distance from the Earth, Jeff Bezos’ farcical Blue Origin stunt covered it. There and back in around 10 minutes, the first all-female spaceflight in over 60 years took as much time—and made as much of a statement—as the average trip to the bathroom.
Unironically marketed as a female empowerment initiative, the irony of a team of women in full “glam” and skintight Oscar de la Renta suits being blasted off into the stratosphere by a chief executive of the broligarchy was not lost on the dismayed plebs watching from below. Earthlings were quick to slam the women for participating in the stunt—among them Oprah’s bestie and formerly-credible journalist Gayle King; activist, bioastronautics scientist, and astrophysicist Amanda Nguyen; and (checks notes) Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez. But we should remind ourselves that, had all of them refused, Bezos would have found others to fill the NASA-approved dildo. Nothing stands between a tech billionaire and his boyhood dreams—least of all, a woman who says “no”. In the words of every Instagram-famous dating coach: If he wanted to, he would. Sánchez is a lucky lady.
As for the rest of us down here who haven’t forgotten that women on Earth are being stripped of rights on a daily basis, we’re wondering how, exactly, this male midlife crisis empowers womankind. We’re living in a world that is being abandoned for space by the very people doing the most to destroy it. At this point, regular people who can’t make ends meet, let alone afford joyrides on rockets, are merely bystanders in our own destruction. The performative representation is a hard pill to swallow for an Earth-bound audience, many of whom are doing their best to simply survive as costs get increasingly more astronomical than opportunities.
Spokesmodels for a vanity mission
Of all the passengers, the only one who gets to call herself an astronaut is the one who has done the most to actually empower women—and she did it all by herself. Amanda Nguyen’s dream of being an astronaut was deferred by a decade, and she dedicated her career to civil rights for sexual assault survivors (following her own at her alma mater, Harvard). Her work has earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and she is behind landmark legislation passed by both the US Congress and the United Nations.
Nguyen is a reminder of the resilience and perseverance of women, the ones who do it against all odds—the odds being systemic barriers created by tax-evading, corruption-funding supervillains like Jeff Bezos. Only Nguyen and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe were actually qualified to be up there, and it’s a pity that they ended up being relegated to spokesmodels for a billionaire’s vanity mission.
Following the crew’s bumpy, scream-filled descent to reality, Gayle King has whined about feeling disrespected. “I don’t like that people are calling it a ride. You never see a male astronaut who’s going up in space, and they said, ‘Oh, he took a ride,’” she said.
When an experienced journalist such as King conflates civilians who got their hair and makeup done for a high-altitude photo op with scientists who have spent years in gruelling training, you have to wonder if the ultra-rich are exempt from gravity altogether. Just how thin is the air down here, let alone up in space?
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What would Butler say?
As I watch this bizarre farce unfold, I wonder what Octavia Butler—the Black feminist sci-fi writer famous for making societal predictions decades before they came to pass—would have made of it. Then I realise, prescient as she was, Butler already said it 30 years ago in Parable of the Sower: “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
Some good did come out of this surreal escapade. Popstar Katy Perry—who used her four minutes of space to announce the setlist for her upcoming tour—imparted a couple of important lessons for her cohabitants in a digital world: just because we have access to a platform doesn’t mean we should use it, and just because we can say something doesn’t mean we should. In her words, “Space is going to finally be glam. Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
Heaven help us, in a way that Mr Bezos will not.
Meera Innes is a writer and public speaker. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
Excellent piece. Hard hitting and relevant, with a superb blend of satire and humour.