On Monday, April 14, six elite American women blasted off into space from west Texas on a self-piloting rocket ship developed by the space technology company Blue Origin, owned by bazillionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The “crew” of the much-ballyhooed all-female flight – marketed by Blue Origin as a giant leap not only for womankind but for the entire world – included pop star Katy Perry, television personality Gayle King, and Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sanchez, author of the children’s book The Fly Who Flew to Space and the organiser of the wannabe feminist space excursion.
In preparation for the star-studded spectacle, Elle magazine ran a fawning cover story on the “historic mission”, which the magazine described as “the first time anybody went to space with their hair and makeup done”. By the end of the article, which is basically a continuous succession of aneurysm-inducing lines, one finds oneself with little hope for the world aside from that an asteroid would strike and just put an end to it all.
Perry, for example, is quoted as declaring that “we are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut”, while also sharing the scintillating logistics of celebrity space travel: “I was like, What am I going to wear?” Then there’s an exchange between Sanchez, who predicts that “we’re going to have [eye]lash extensions flying in the capsule!”, and King, who wonders if the lashes will “stay on”, prompting the response from Sanchez: “Mine are glued on. They’re good.”
Fellow “crew” member Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, explains that she “wanted to test out” her hair to make sure it was rocket-ready: “So I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good.”
None of this is to say, of course, that women can’t care about their eyelashes and hair. But in a world in which a whole lot of women don’t have money to eat – much less skydive in one of the planet’s most expensive places to see how their hair might fare during an 11-minute, multimillion-dollar jaunt in outer space – such chatter does nothing to further female empowerment.
It does everything, however, to reinforce inequality – and makes a mockery of Sanchez’s pre-flight claim that “we’re going to be able to come back and inspire people and bring people together.” Following the completion of Monday’s flight, she was quoted as reflecting on her quick inspection of the Earth from above: “You look at this, and you’re like, ‘We’re all in this together.’”
To be sure, it requires an astronomical hypocrisy to invoke a collective “we” when not all of “us” are engaged to the world’s second-richest human, who as of March had a net worth of $231.2bn. We’re also not really “in this together” when Bezos himself is actively abetting the obliteration of solidarity in the United States, cosying up to President Donald Trump – whose anti-feminist agenda is, mind you, clear as day – as he goes about happily dismantling whatever semblance of rights remain in the country.
The Blue Origin website assures visitors that the company “exists for the benefit of Earth” and boasts a “passion for preserving Earth”, which is “humanity’s forever home”. To that end, Blue Origin allegedly strives “to minimize our carbon footprint and promote sustainable practices in all aspects of our operations” – reusable rockets, reusable engines, and so on – which ultimately amounts to nothing but your typical corporate claptrap that allows the super-rich to keep annihilating the earth and its atmosphere while claiming not to.
And it’s not just Blue Origin that has enabled Bezos’s own carbon footprint to asphyxiate “humanity’s forever home”. He remains the executive chairman and largest shareholder at Amazon, which, as the Washington, DC-based group Food & Water Watch noted last year, has generated hundreds of millions of pounds of plastic packaging – “part of a larger crisis clogging our planet with plastic pollution and setting our climate ablaze”.
The report explains that as plastic breaks down, “it gets into the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe, harming humans and ecosystems around the globe.”
No wonder the rich are looking to escape.
Obviously, Bezos is not singlehandedly responsible for the Earth’s demise. There are plenty of other plutocrats who have done their fair share while preaching sustainability, including Elon Musk – the world’s richest person, founder of the space technology company SpaceX, and aspiring coloniser of Mars.
But Blue Origin’s “historic” publicity stunt has put a faux feminist face on a system predicated on destruction and inequality – one in which Americans must continue to die of poverty on a huge scale so that the elite minority can ride around in self-piloting rockets. Why spend billions of dollars to alleviate terrestrial suffering when you can shoot for the stars instead?
In the end, the stunt did not receive quite the rave reviews that were expected from the press and social media commentariat. It was so bad, in fact, that even The New York Times felt compelled to use the word “capitalism” in its assessment that “Blue Origin’s all-female flight proves that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most extravagant spoils alongside rich men.”
Indeed, this is capitalism on rocket fuel – taking acute socioeconomic injustice and blasting it into outer space.
Perry, who dramatically kissed the ground after descending from the rocket ship, professed to now “feel super connected to love” and pronounced the trip “all for the benefit of Earth”.
The vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants would no doubt be forgiven for failing to detect any sort of “benefit” – like, say, the Palestinian women and children currently being bombed to smithereens in the US-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip.
In the meantime, we can only hope everyone’s eyelash extensions stayed on.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
