Katy Perry co-stars with Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez in a new cover story for Elle magazine, explaining why she’s joining her famous gal pals for a “historic,” all-female space flight this month aboard a rocket owned by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company.
The pop singer said on Instagram Wednesday that she’s participating in the April 14 flight to inspire the “next generation” of women, including her daughter, Daisy, to never “have limits on her dreams.”
But many people are not buying the female empowerment spin put out by Perry, King, Sanchez or Elle magazine, criticizing these celebrities and the magazine on social media for participating in a “PR stunt” on behalf of the “oligarch” couple Sanchez and Bezos.
“You cannot rebrand oligarchy as feminism, especially when the information is in our face every day,” said Internet personality and entrepreneur Blakely Neiman Thornton in an Internet takedown on the Elle cover that garnered more than 5,000 likes in four hours. He called the cover “embarrassing” for everyone involved.
Emblazoned with the cover line, “For All Womankind,” the cover features Sanchez, Perry, CBS Mornings co-host King and several other stars of “Blue Origin’s All-Female Flight” — former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, movie producer Kerianne Flynn and activist Amanda Nguyen. The women are all dressed in black, as if to appear serious about their debatable message about female empowerment.
But the women also talk bout the 11-minute flight, past the international boundary of space as if it’s a fun girls’ night out, according to Page Six. Perhaps in an effort to seem fun-living and relatable to regular women, Bezos’s fiancee dons one of her usual cleavage-pushing necklines and jokes about getting “lash extensions,” while Perry says she wants to bring the “glam” to their space flight and Nguyen says she’ll be wearing lipstick in order to show how women “contain multitudes.”
In response, Thornton and other people on social media bought the snark as they weighed in on the celebrity pretensions they found in this Elle magazine project. The humor was used to underline deep concerns they said they have about the magazine and these celebrities using their platforms to promote the billionaire Amazon founder and his fiancée following their high-profile embrace of Donald Trump’s presidency, which, they say, has contributed to his chaos and condones his move towards authoritarianism.
“Seriously, what’s the pitch?” Thornton asked. “Katy Perry goes to space to get 143 more fans? Gayle King leaves earth’s atmosphere to escape Oprah’s shadow? If you get betrothed to a technocrat, you can break the sound barrier?”
“What’s lower than sponcon (sponsored content) for Jeff Bezos’s pet project with rockets?” Thornton continued, directing his comment at Elle magazine. “I understand that in late-stage capitalism the ruling class is going to buy press, but you cannot rebrand your vanity as altruism. Too much has happened.”
Others also shared their disappointment and anger about the Elle cover and about Bezos and Sanchez trying to “use celebrities as a smokescreen for opulence and corruption,” as Thornton said.
“We asked for universal healthcare. Instead we get the Real Housewives of Mars,” one person said darkly.
“Stop trying to pass rich women doing something banal such as this as a step forward for women as a whole,” another person said. “It’s performative af and frankly tone deaf. Bad look Elle.”
King has been called out before for participating in this space flight, especially given that she’s a journalist at a time when Bezos and Sanchez have become polarizing public figures, having inserted themselves into the national political discourse about Trump’s presidency and the plight of regular Americans.
People have raised questions about the ethics of her and of CBS News possibly receiving a “freebie” from Bezos and Sanchez for her ride on his rocket. A ticket for a Blue Origin flight can run into the six figures, according to NBC News.
However, King seems eager to ignore such questions and to double down on getting to star in such an opportunity. She shared four Instagram posts about her Elle magazine cover, giggling in one video about her fear of heights. She had fans who congratulated her and sent their best wishes for her safe return home. But others lambasted her for her perceived “complicity” in Bezos and Sanchez’s promotional effort.
“I’m scared of having my right to an abortion taken away and my health insurance. But sure…” one person said to King. “Is the yachting worth it?” asked another.
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