There was always going to be something profoundly conflicting about the idea of sending Katy Perry into space. On the one hand, she might have got stuck there, unable to come back to Earth to plague us with her increasingly ghastly records. On the other hand, with such precious cargo as Jeff Bezos’s wife, Lauren Sanchez, as a co-astronaut, you know a mistake like that wouldn’t be allowed to happen and that the crew would all soon be back on terra firma showing off.
‘It’s a step backwards for feminism!’, squealed much of the media following Perry’s all-female trip to outer space on Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. Yet such comments came from the same excitable publications that tend to say this about everything from a male dog winning Best in Show at Crufts to Rachel Reeves having a bad hair day, so keen are they to slam feminism for murky reasons of their own. In truth, it wasn’t a bad day for feminism but for the liberal entertainment establishment, offering yet more proof of how unbearable liberal-establishment celebrities are.
Perry and Sanchez were accompanied by Oprah’s friend, Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, astronaut and activist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. I think we can all guess which way they vote. Some of them are obviously plus-ones, but some are achievers in their own right. Still, it’s unfortunate that Perry was the representative of showbiz lucky enough to be chosen. It gave the whole event a rather dated, shop-worn feel. Couldn’t they have got Rachel Zegler from the new Snow White? Who, let’s face it, can probably use a new career opportunity, preferably on another planet, sometime in the near future.
If the point of the project was to inspire the little girls of today to become the brave space invaders of the future, then might it have been better to have avoided someone like Perry? Before the launch, she declared she was aiming to ‘put the ass into astronaut ’. Obviously, all astronauts have asses or they wouldn’t be able to survive. No, Perry’s statement was solely to draw attention to the fact that well-kept women’s behinds are attractive to men. But the same is true of well-kept men’s behinds to women (see Chippendales and any other male strip troupe) and to male homosexuals. Imagine a male astronaut saying it – you can’t, without cracking up, as it’s just ludicrous. Also, Katy Perry is 40 years old. I’m quite immature, even at 65, but I do believe that even I, at 40, about to be shot into space, wouldn’t have been thinking about the fact that I had a bum. I really do believe that my mind would be – literally – on higher things.
Still, there’s not a lot of proof that Katy Perry has much of a mind – let alone much of a voice, as anyone who heard her rendition of the sublime Louis Armstrong song, ‘What a Wonderful World’, on the flight would be able to testify. Watching her singing at King Charles’s Coronation Concert in 2023, while wearing an off-the-shoulder gold lamé ballgown, which revealed a good deal of lush cleavage, I couldn’t help but think that she wouldn’t be as successful as she is if she didn’t look the way she does – like the lovechild of Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit. Her rather bland voice seems best suited to soundtracking television commercials advertising sanitary products.
Lack of talent hasn’t stopped her, though. Perry has sold over 143million records and had her music streamed 115 billion times. However, her recent career has been something of a damp squib. Feminist anthems have certainly ‘petered out’ in terms of power and popularity since Helen Reddy bellowed ‘I Am Woman’. But even the most pessimistic among us never foresaw the abomination that was last year’s ‘Woman’s World’ – a ditty so atrociously banal that an AI bot would sue if accused of composing it:
‘Sexy, confident
So intelligent
She is heaven-sent
So soft, so strong.
She’s a winner, champion
Superhuman, No1
She’s a sister, a mother
Open your eyes, just look around and you’ll discover you know
It’s a woman’s world
And you’re lucky to be living in it.’
Unlike a lot of old people, I love seeing the hen parties out and about where I live in Brighton. But when you mix modern females and space rockets (except if one is attached as a rude prosthetic to a male stripper), you do lower the tone somewhat. Watching Perry and pals mucking about and taking selfies on the rocket made me yearn for the lonely grandeur of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. She was a Russian factory girl and amateur skydiver who spent three days in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times, at the age of only 26. After the triumph of Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the Soviets got wind that the Americans had started training female astronauts. ‘We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American’, said the then head of cosmonaut training. ‘This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women.’
As with Gagarin and Tereshkova, going it alone gives space travel much of its grandeur. The loneliness, the self-reliance, the fear and no one to share it with. When there are six ‘crew’ members on board, and none is really required to be there, it becomes to some extent a jolly, and that’s certainly what Katy Perry’s jaunt looked like.
What would a party of women sent into space by our side – free-speakers, libertarians, whatever – look like? It would be a lot less self-congratulatory and sophomoric than this shower, for sure.
Still, I’m looking forward the most to the first all-trans space voyage, when a group of big hairy men in trowel-fulls of make-up and pink space suits try to maintain their femininity, dignity and wildly urinating penises at zero gravity.
Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.
