When Katy Perry rocketed into suborbital space with Blue Origin’s first all-female crew, the intended message was one of empowerment: a cosmic celebration of women breaking new frontiers. But the internet, as it often does, offered little room for nuance. Within hours, the voyage was recast not as a feminist milestone but a tone-deaf PR stunt, a symbol of excess at a time of global economic anxiety and environmental collapse.
Advertisement The backlash was swift, cruel, and deeply gendered. Critics called it a wasteful vanity trip. Olivia Munn publicly denounced it as “gluttonous.” Wendy’s chimed in with a mocking tweet.
And while other high-profile passengers – like journalist Gayle King or Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez – received some side-eye, it was Perry who became the lightning rod. “A human piñata,” she has recently described herself. But why her?
This isn’t just about space tourism, or even celebrity activism gone wrong. It’s about how we treat women who dare to take up too much space – physically, emotionally, and metaphorically. And it’s a reminder that in 2025, female visibility, especially when paired with power, remains a threat to the social order.
Advertisement There’s a particular ire reserved for women like Perry: ambitious, unapologetic, hyper-visible. Her every move, from pop music spectacle to philanthropic work, is dissected and repurposed by a culture constantly shifting the goalposts. When she performs for millions on tour, she’s “attention-seeking.” When she dares to transcend the Earth’s atmosphere with a message of empowerment, she’s “out of touch.” No context is ever enough to justify her presence.
Meanwhile, countless male celebrities have floated through space – William Shatner, Michael Strahan, even Bezos himself – without sparking such visceral disdain. Their trips were treated as quirky headlines or technological curiosity. Perry’s, however, became a referendum on moral priorities, environmental degradation, and economic inequality.
Those are valid conversations, but they’re rarely forced upon male figures in such punitive terms. Perry’s emotional Instagram response is more than celebrity damage control. It’s a meditation on vulnerability in the digital age.
“The internet is very much so a dumping ground for unhinged and unhealed,” she wrote. That sentiment resonates in a world where social media outrage has become sport, where dehumanisation is algorithmically rewarded. Advertisement But it’s also an act of resistance.
Perry refuses to perform the polished perfection expected of female pop stars. She openly discusses therapy, self-doubt, and the bruises fame leaves behind. Her metaphor of “playing the game of life with an audience of many” feels particularly apt.
Because Perry’s journey isn’t just her own – it’s emblematic of what happens when women try to play by the same rules that elevate men, only to find those rules rewritten in real time. Even Lily Allen, who initially criticised Perry, later admitted her comments were steeped in internalised misogyny. “I would actually like to apologise for being mean about Katy Perry last week,” Allen said on her podcast “Miss Me?”.
“There was actually no need for me to bring her name into it, and it was my own internalised misogyny.” We don’t have to pretend that space tourism is beyond reproach. It’s valid to question its environmental and social impacts. But it’s also crucial to interrogate how and at whom our critiques are aimed.
If we claim to care about equity and progress, then we also acknowledge when our cultural scapegoating serves to reinforce old hierarchies. Advertisement Because maybe the real issue isn’t that Perry flew too high – but that we still don’t know how to watch a woman fly without wanting to clip her wings. Katy Perry’s The Lifetimes Tour kicks off in Australia on June 4th in Sydney.
To get tickets, go to premier.ticketek.com.au
