A member of an all-female crew, pop-star Katy Perry partook in an 11-minute suborbital space flight with Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on April 14. Purportedly attempting to utilize the flight to “raise women up,” the entire ordeal instead gained backlash for being an embarrassment to women everywhere.

Other notable members of the crew included Lauren Sánchez (Jeff Bezos’ fiancee), Gayle King (CBS news anchor), Aisha Bowe (former NASA rocket scientist), Amanda Nguyen (civil rights activist) and Kerianne Flynn (film producer). From the widely known crew to the event being highly televised and documented, it is no secret everything was curated for maximum publicity.

However, completely contrasting the goal of the flight, the crew members have faced major criticism, with Perry being the main target. Pictures and videos of the flight show her dancing around, reportedly singing to the crew and even jumping out of the rocket to kiss the ground when back on Earth. Every single action taken rang loudly of shallowness and lack of thought.

I get it, Katy, you want to motivate young girls. And it may have seemed that singing and floating around in a million-dollar rocket could have done that. But let’s be honest: co-opting feminist rhetoric and ideologies to enforce the idea that women (who are already very successful) need to be put in skin-tight blue jumpsuits and be so totally “super-connected to life” to be acknowledged in the field of STEM is blatantly tone-deaf and regressive.

In a generation where developing female minds are glued to a screen all day, media literacy is still surprisingly low. The smallest amounts of social media influence can play a huge role in shaping their perception of societal roles. Katy, by publicly saying your all-female team of accomplished business owners and entrepreneurs are “putting the a** in astronaut” you are reducing strong women to objects. You are not empowering them– you are embarrassing them, shrinking them and demoralizing them. 

Now, I understand that criticizing a woman for an attempt to motivate others is inherently hypocritical. This mission did truly have the potential to uplift women and celebrate their accomplishments, but it was handled in a way that did exactly the opposite. Any pop-star with millions of dollars and a publicity team should have been able to see that hopping out of a rocket and kissing the ground for the cameras would not portray women as trailblazers, but rather reinforce the false idea that they are merely performative and dramatic.

All I can say is, an 11-minute public speech on gaining footing in a professional industry as a woman would’ve been much more impactful– and surely a lot less foolish.