Just girlboss me straight into the sun

Katy Perry, you go first.

We’re still celebrating the third anniversary of this here newsletter! And for said celebration, I’m offering 30% off a year of paid subscriptions! That’s $3.5/month, or $35/year. It’s a great deal, but you have to act now!

Burnt out on monthly subscriptions right now? I feel you. You can also buy me a tea one time to help fuel my rage-filled rants like this one.

---

We have truly, madly, deeply abandoned subtext here, haven’t we? Because this week, the ambulant thumb injected with HGH known as Jeff Bezos sent his fiancée and five of her nearest acquaintances to literally girlboss, gaslight, and gatekeep too close to the sun. The Blue Origin spaceflight, which was not a mission so much as a party bus ride, went into the suburbs of real space and back for a total of 11 minutes. The passengers included: Gayle King, who at least had the good grace to look mildly embarrassed; Katy Perry, who went in the exact opposite direction with it; activist Amanda Nguyen; film producer Kerianne Flynn; aforementioned Bezos fiancée and journalist Lauren Sánchez; and actually-credentialed-for-this-trip aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe. Not included: any self-awareness, humility, or interest in reading a single room.

Girlboss

We heard the most from Katy Perry on this, which I found quite telling. Presumably Bezos was also yapping about his little rocket, but Katy was the only one whose PR campaign entered my orbit. And what a campaign it was! Like something out of her press tour for the thunderously hollow feminism of “WOMAN’S WORLD,” all over again.

It’s a satire. Duh.

And honestly, I think she just has Girl Power feminism rattling around that thunderously hollow skull of hers. I think she genuinely believes that her ability to promote her tour on a piece of butterfly-shaped paper in space is a win for all women, not just the one woman with a tour to promote and no other convictions. I think she really thinks people believe she was reading a book about Pythagorean string theory to prep for this. She really is a girlboss. Which makes her the perfect face for this campaign, honestly. No better fall guy than a true believer with a full beat.

A feminist icon.

Gaslight

The past decade has wrung all potency and meaning out of this word, but still. Bezos and Friends are absolutely gaslighting us with this little stunt. To call these six women’s spin around the stratosphere a historic win for representation would be offensive in a vacuum. To do so while women are being deleted from government websites, told to self-deport regardless of their citizenship status, and kidnapped for writing op-eds in student newspapers? Hell, while actual female astronauts are getting defunded? Utter moral bankruptcy. It feels about as dishonest as flapping about free speech encroachments on college campuses for four years, and then going radio silent when the President literally holds federal funding to universities hostage unless they agree to follow his political agenda. Or calling students staging peaceful protests for a ceasefire in Gaza “violence,” and having nothing to say about the actual state violence of kidnapping and illegally detaining students for the crime of having thoughts.

Through all of this behavior, they’re diluting the meaning of the real thing so that nobody need take the real thing seriously anymore. If female empowerment is Katy Perry singing “What A Wonderful World” and then kissing the ground after a trip that Ms. Frizzle could do in a coma, then we can agree that the whole thing is quite silly, really.

This and yap 🙏🏽

If space exploration is just millionaires gallivanting for self-promotion rather than research purposes, then funding NASA is pretty frivolous, really.

Except no, not really. Despite everyone’s efforts to the contrary here, words still mean things. None of this is empowering or inspiring.

Gatekeep

…well, except to the actual intended audience. The gaslighting is just for us povvos. What this simulation really was, was an advertisement for Blue Origin. Bezos wants more people inspired to buy million-dollar tickets to space, and for him to get empowered by those millions of dollars. So it’s actually okay that the government has spent the past 25 years slowly and then aggressively abandoning space exploration and research! It’s okay that we’re trashing this planet, the only one most of us could hope to know, to the point of unlivability! Gayle and the Girlboss Gaggle got to giggle it up in zero-g, and remind their peers that they don’t have to suffer any consequences for anything. They get to gatekeep a life and a future that should belong to all of us. Totally worth it!