2 weeks Ago By Jacqueline Maley
Trump 2.0 is testing us all in unexpected ways. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has discovered what it is to be ghosted – after calling Albanese a “very fine man”, Trump is now refusing to take his calls .
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is suffering from allegations that he is too simpatico with the US president, to the extent where he was compelled to tell voters this week, near-pleadingly: “I don’t know the president. I have never met him ..
. I don’t know Donald Trump”. The all-female occupents of Blue Origin’s flight (clockwise from top left) : Katy Perry, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, Lauren Sanchez and Amanda Nguyen.
Credit: NYT Some have been tested by being sent, apparently unlawfully, to a notorious El Salvadorean prison , and others have been publicly humiliated at the White House while on a break from defending their country from aggressive authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, most women I know would have happily spent the week minding their own business. Instead, we faced such an affront to our feminist values that we were lured out of whatever pre-Easter news-free bubble we were trying to idle about in.
We didn’t want to look but we found we couldn’t look away when, on Wednesday, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin – a space technology company – launched an all-female, B and C-list celebrity crew of six into space , wearing skintight designer spacesuits and heavy make-up. It was the first fully-lady-mission since Russian astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo space flight in 1963. Jeff Bezos, Kerianne Flynn, Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez, Aisha Bowe, Gayle King, Amanda Nguyen, Sarah Knights, director of Blue Origin’s astronaut office, and Blue Origin chief executive Dave Limp.
Credit: AP The team consisted of the billionaire Bezos’ fiancée, the television journalist and children’s book author Lauren Sanchez, pop star Katy Perry, television host and Oprah-bestie Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, activist, sexual assault survivor and scientist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. “I was like, ‘What am I going to wear?’“, Perry told Elle of her initial reaction to the invitation. “But seriously, I have wanted to go to space for almost 20 years.
” In terms of publicity for space tourism for the rich and (dubiously) famous, it was a bonanza. But the heavily-girlified nature of the rhetoric around the mission (if we can call it that - the trip lasted for 11 minutes), and its explicit branding as an exercise in empowering girls to aspire to careers in space exploration, well, that made it a very dark day for feminism..
