{"id":28929,"date":"2025-04-18T00:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T00:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/28929\/"},"modified":"2025-04-18T00:59:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T00:59:07","slug":"katy-perrys-space-jaunt-was-galaxy-level-cringe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/28929\/","title":{"rendered":"Katy Perry\u2019s space jaunt was galaxy-level cringe"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was always going to be something profoundly conflicting about the idea of sending Katy Perry into space<\/a>. 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\u2019s wife, Lauren Sanchez, as a co-astronaut, you know a mistake like that wouldn\u2019t be allowed to happen and that the crew would all soon be back on terra firma showing off. <\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s a step backwards for feminism!\u2019, squealed<\/a> much of the media following Perry\u2019s all-female trip to outer space on Bezos\u2019s 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\u2019t a bad day for feminism but for the liberal entertainment establishment, offering yet more proof of how unbearable liberal-establishment celebrities are. <\/p>\n

Perry and Sanchez were accompanied by Oprah\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t they have got Rachel Zegler from the new Snow White<\/a>? Who, let\u2019s face it, can probably use a new career opportunity, preferably on another planet, sometime in the near future.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018put the ass into astronaut<\/a> \u2019. Obviously, all astronauts have asses or they wouldn\u2019t be able to survive. No, Perry\u2019s statement was solely to draw attention to the fact that well-kept women\u2019s behinds are attractive to men. But the same is true of well-kept men\u2019s behinds to women (see Chippendales and any other male strip troupe) and to male homosexuals. Imagine a male astronaut saying it \u2013 you can\u2019t, without cracking up, as it\u2019s just ludicrous. Also, Katy Perry is 40 years old. I\u2019m quite immature, even at 65, but I do believe that even I, at 40, about to be shot into space, wouldn\u2019t have been thinking about the fact that I had a bum. I really do believe that my mind would be \u2013 literally \u2013 on higher things. <\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s not a lot of proof that Katy Perry has much of a mind \u2013 let alone much of a voice, as anyone who heard her rendition of the sublime Louis Armstrong song, \u2018What a Wonderful World\u2019, on the flight would be able to testify. Watching her singing at King Charles\u2019s Coronation Concert<\/a> in 2023, while wearing an off-the-shoulder gold lam\u00e9 ballgown, which revealed a good deal of lush cleavage, I couldn\u2019t help but think that she wouldn\u2019t be as successful as she is if she didn\u2019t look the way she does \u2013 like the lovechild of Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit. Her rather bland voice seems best suited to soundtracking television commercials advertising sanitary products.<\/p>\n

Lack of talent hasn\u2019t stopped her, though. Perry has sold over 143million records<\/a> and had her music streamed 115 billion times<\/a>. However, her recent career has been something of a damp squib. Feminist anthems have certainly \u2018petered out\u2019 in terms of power and popularity since Helen Reddy bellowed \u2018I Am Woman\u2019. But even the most pessimistic among us never foresaw the abomination that was last year\u2019s \u2018Woman\u2019s World\u2019 \u2013 a ditty so atrociously banal that an AI bot would sue if accused of composing it:<\/p>\n

\u2018Sexy, confident
So intelligent
She is heaven-sent
So soft, so strong.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a winner, champion
Superhuman, No1
She\u2019s a sister, a mother
Open your eyes, just look around and you\u2019ll discover you know<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a woman\u2019s world
And you\u2019re lucky to be living in it.\u2019 <\/p>\n

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. \u2018We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American\u2019, said the then head of cosmonaut training. \u2018This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women.\u2019<\/p>\n

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 \u2018crew\u2019 members on board, and none is really required to be there, it becomes to some extent a jolly, and that\u2019s certainly what Katy Perry\u2019s jaunt looked like.<\/p>\n

What would a party of women sent into space by our side \u2013 free-speakers, libertarians, whatever \u2013 look like? It would be a lot less self-congratulatory and sophomoric than this shower, for sure. <\/p>\n

Still, I\u2019m 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. <\/p>\n

Julie Burchill<\/strong>\u00a0is a\u00a0spiked\u00a0columnist. Her book,\u00a0Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.<\/p>\n