After returning from an 11-minute trip to space earlier this month, Katy Perry found herself at the center of a storm of criticism. The backlash reached such a point that even the fast food chain Wendy’s publicly asked, “Can we send her back?” They later claimed to respect the singer, but refused to apologize. If it makes Perry feel any better, the singer-songwriter Lily Allen actually is sorry for her own role in contributing to the pile on.
On her podcast Miss Me?, Allen criticized the Blue Origin flight occupants for framing it as “some sort of feminist thing.” The capsule was occupied by Perry, Gayle King, journalist (and Jeff Bezos’ fiancée) Lauren Sánchez, sexual assault survivor advocate and Nobel nominee Amanda Nguyễn, film producer and documentarian Kerianne Flynn, and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe. “The only one who really should be congratulated is the rocket scientist called Aisha Bowe. There’s also a civil rights activist, Amanda Nguyễn,” she said.
But where the other women could have shared the blame, Allen felt as though she unfairly singled out Perry. “I would actually like to apologize for being mean about Katy Perry last week,” she said on a more recent podcast episode. “There was actually no need for me to bring her name into it. And it was my own internalized misogyny. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and it was just completely unnecessary to pile on with her.”
Allen isn’t standing down on her criticism, which included points that appeared in many critiques of the trip from the general public and other celebrities alike. “We’re on the brink of recession, people are really fucking struggling to make ends meet and get food on their table,” she said, calling out the “terrible timing” of the media-dominating trip. “I mean, what the fucking hell is that all about? But in all seriousness: What? Why? For why?”
But in the episode, Allen recognizes that Perry wasn’t up there floating around weightless on her own. “I disagree with what it was that they did, but she wasn’t the only person that did it. She was possibly the most famous and the one that — it divides people the most,” Allen said. “I don’t know, there was something in me that decided to choose her as the person … Well, anyway, I’m just sorry. I would have been hurt if it had been me and someone in my industry used me and my name.”
King was the first women in the group to publicly respond to the criticism and similarly called out an element of misogyny. “You never see a man, a male astronaut, who’s going up in space and they say, ‘Oh, he took a ride,’” the broadcast journalist said. “It’s always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel that’s a little disrespectful to what the mission was and the work that Blue Origin does.”
The trip was celebrated as a feminist milestone for it being the first all-female space flight since 1963, when cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. “My question is, have y’all been to space?” King asked. “Go to space or go to Blue Origin and see what they do and then come back and say, ‘This is a terrible thing.’”
