The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism | Moira Donegan
www.theguardian.com
The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness

There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-female flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.

The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress – a spectacle that mocked these aspirations by appropriating them for such an indulgent and morally hollow purpose.

  • orcrist@lemm.eeEnglish
    119·
    5 days ago

    And that’s some pretty bad writing. A funeral for scientific advancement and feminism? What the hell is the author talking about. I don’t think they have any idea. Actually, maybe it was written by AI and they really don’t have any idea.

    • IndustryStandard@lemmy.worldOP
      13·
      5 days ago

      But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man. (The fact that the rocket itself looks so phallic does not help to lessen the flight’s message that the surest way for women to raise themselves in the world is to attach themselves to a man.)

      What here is AI?

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
      11·
      5 days ago

      you sound more like AI, have you read the article at all?

      "In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women, and particularly women of color, in Stem. (The Trump administration has forced Nasa to close some offices in order to comply with its ban on the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that would recruit such candidates.) But mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said, bizarrely. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”

      Peak feminism